Polymer translocation through a nanopore

We investigate the dynamics of polymer translocation through a nanopore under an externally applied field using the 2D fluctuating bond model with single-segment Monte Carlo moves. We concentrate on the influence of the field strength E, length of the chain N, and length of the pore L on forced translocation. As our main result, we find a crossover scaling for the translocation time τ with the chain length from 2 N ν τ ∼ for relatively short polymers to 1 N ν τ + ∼ for longer chains, where ν is the Flory exponent. We demonstrate that this crossover is due to the change in the dependence of the translocation velocity v on the chain length. For relatively short chains v N ν − ∼ , which crosses over to 1 v N − ∼ for long polymers. The reason for this is that with increasing N there is a high density of segments near the exit of the pore, which slows down the translocation process due to slow relaxation of the chain. For the case of a long nanopore for which R , the radius of gyration Rg along the pore, is smaller than the pore length, we find no clear scaling of the translocation time with the chain length. For large N, however, the asymptotic scaling 1 N ν τ + ∼ is recovered. In this regime, τ is almost independent of L. We have previously found that for a polymer, which is initially placed in the middle of the pore, there is a minimum in the escape time for R L ≈ . We show here that this minimum persists for a weak fields E such that EL is less than some critical value, but vanishes for large values of EL. a Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: [email protected] b E-mail: [email protected] c E-mail: [email protected] 1