U. Seifert et al., STRAIGHTENING OF THERMAL FLUCTUATIONS IN SEMIFLEXIBLE POLYMERS BY APPLIED TENSION, Physical review letters, 77(27), 1996, pp. 5389-5392
We investigate the propagation of a suddenly applied tension along a t
hermally excited semiflexible polymer using analytical approximations,
scaling arguments, and numerical simulation. This problem is inherent
ly nonlinear. We find subdiffusive propagation with a dynamical expone
nt of 1/4. By generalizing the internal elasticity, we show that tense
strings exhibit qualitatively different tension profiles and propagat
ion with an exponent of 1/2.