Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: Polymer Crowding and Shape Distributions in Polymer-Nanoparticle
  Mixtures   Macromolecular crowding can influence polymer shapes, which is important for
understanding the thermodynamic stability of polymer solutions and the
structure and function of biopolymers (proteins, RNA, DNA) under confinement.
We explore the influence of nanoparticle crowding on polymer shapes via Monte
Carlo simulations and free-volume theory of a coarse-grained model of
polymer-nanoparticle mixtures. Exploiting the geometry of random walks, we
model polymer coils as effective penetrable ellipsoids, whose shapes fluctuate
according to the probability distributions of the eigenvalues of the gyration
tensor. Accounting for the entropic cost of a nanoparticle penetrating a larger
polymer coil, we compute the crowding-induced shift in the shape distributions,
radius of gyration, and asphericity of ideal polymers in a theta solvent. With
increased nanoparticle crowding, we find that polymers become more compact
(smaller, more spherical), in agreement with predictions of free-volume theory.
Our approach can be easily extended to nonideal polymers in good solvents and
used to model conformations of biopolymers in crowded environments.

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The categories of this paper are: math
12
The categories of this paper are: nucl-th
18
The categories of this paper are: econ
31
The categories of this paper are: ao-sci
3
The categories of this paper are: physics
10
The categories of this paper are: q-bio
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The categories of this paper are: gr-qc
21
The categories of this paper are: adap-org
33
The categories of this paper are: plasm-ph
20
The categories of this paper are: acc-phys
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The categories of this paper are: hep-ex
37
The categories of this paper are: supr-con
13
The categories of this paper are: quant-ph
19
The categories of this paper are: eess
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The categories of this paper are: cs
35
The categories of this paper are: mtrl-th