Dynamics of a polyampholyte hooked around an obstacle

Abstract

We consider polyampholytes (PAs), which are polymers carrying positive and negative charges. The PAs are submitted to electric fields and collide with single obstacles. Field separation of PAs depends drastically on ${\ensuremath{\tau}}_{u},$ the time to unhook. Our analysis shows ${\ensuremath{\tau}}_{u}$ to be very sensitive to the charge distribution of the chains: Unhooking is diffusional for regular, multiblock PAs, with ${\ensuremath{\tau}}_{u}$ depending on the length of the blocks; for random charge distributions ${\ensuremath{\tau}}_{u}$ increases exponentially with the PAs' length and unhooking is subdiffusive.