Equilibrium and nonequilibrium effects of a single polymer chain during cyclic deformation: A Monte Carlo study

Self-generated disorder and structural glass formation in homopolymer globules

We have investigated the interrelation between spin glasses and structural glasses. Spin glasses in this case are p-spin interaction spin glasses (at p>2) or Potts glasses that contain quenched disorder, whereas the structural glasses are here exemplified by a homopolymeric globule, which can be viewed as a liquid of connected units on a nanoscale. It is argued that the homopolymeric globule problem can be mapped onto a disorder field theoretical model whose effective Hamiltonian resembles the corresponding one for the spin glass model. In this sense the disorder in the globule is self-generated (in contrast to spin glasses) and can be related to competing interactions (virial coefficients of different signs) and the chain connectivity. The work is aimed at giving a quantitative description of this analogy. We have investigated in the mean-field approximation the phase diagram of the homopolymeric globule where the transition line from the liquid to glassy globule is treated in terms of the replica symmetry breaking paradigm. The configurational entropy temperature dependence is also discussed.