Luís A. Nunes Amaral

Professor of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics
Professor of Medicine (by courtesy)
Professor of Molecular Biosciences (by courtesy)
Professor of Physics & Astronomy (by courtesy)

Chemical & Biological Engineering
2145 Sheridan Road (Room E136)
EvanstonIL 60208US
Phone: (847) 491-7850

Abstract

We map the conformation space of a short lattice polymer chain to a network, where i) the vertices of the network have a one-to-one correspondence to the conformations of the chain, and ii) a link between two vertices indicates the possibility of switching from one conformation to the other by a single Monte Carlo move of the chain. We find that the geometric properties of this network are similar to those of small-world networks, namely, the diameter of conformation space increases, for large networks, as the logarithm of the number of conformations, while locally the network appears to have low dimensionality.