Polymer translocation induced by adsorption

We study the translocation of a flexible polymer through a pore in a membrane induced by its adsorption on the trans side of the membrane. When temperature T is higher than T-c, the adsorption-desorption transition temperature, the attractive interaction between polymer and membrane plays little role in affecting polymer conformation, leading to translocation time that scales as tau similar to L-3, where L is the polymer contour length. When T<T-c, however, the translocation time undergoes a sharp crossover to tau similar to L-2 for sufficiently long polymers, following the second-order conformational (adsorption) transition. The translocation time is found to exhibit the crossover around T=T-c', which is lower than T-c for polymers shorter than a critical length (N < N-c). (C) 1998 American Institute of Physics.