Self-Avoiding Wormlike Chain Confined in a Cylindrical Tube: Scaling Behavior

Within a confining tube section, the multithreads of a strongly confined, backfolding polymer exert the excluded-volume repulsions on each other and produce physical properties that are very different from those of a confined ideal chain. The conformational properties of a such confined wormlike chain are of fundamental interest and are also practically useful in understanding the DNA confinement problems. Here, the excluded-volume effects are added to the standard wormlike-chain model by a self-consistent field theory. The numerical solutions are examined in light of their scaling properties.