Semiflexible crossing-avoiding trails on plane-filling fractals

Abstract

© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. We have studied the statistics of semiflexible polymer chains modeled by crossing-avoiding trails (CAT) situated on the family of plane-filling (PF) fractals. The fractals are compact, that is, their fractal dimension df is equal to 2 for all members of the fractal family. By applying the exact and Monte Carlo real-space renormalization group method we have calculated the critical exponent ν, which governs the scaling behavior of the end-to-end distance of the polymer, as well as the entropic critical exponent γ, for a large set of fractals, and various values of polymer flexibility. Our results, obtained for CAT model on PF fractals, show that both critical exponents depend on the polymer flexibility, in such a way that less flexible polymer chains display enlarged values of ν, and diminished values of γ. We have compared the obtained results for CAT model with the known results for the self-avoiding walk and self-avoiding trail models and discussed the influence of excluded volume effect on the values of semiflexible polymer critical exponents, for a large set of studied compact fractals.