A geometrical approach to computing free-energy landscapes from short-ranged potentials.

ABSTRACT: Particles interacting with short-ranged potentials have attracted increasing interest, partly for their ability to model mesoscale systems such as colloids interacting via DNA or depletion. We consider the free-energy landscape of such systems as the range of the potential goes to zero. In this limit, the landscape is entirely defined by geometrical manifolds, plus a single control parameter. These manifolds are fundamental objects that do not depend on the details of the interaction potential and provide the starting point from which any quantity characterizing the system--equilibrium or nonequilibrium--can be computed for arbitrary potentials. To consider dynamical quantities we compute the asymptotic limit of the Fokker-Planck equation and show that it becomes restricted to the low-dime

SUBMITTER: Holmes-Cerfon M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3538236 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature