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Passage Times for Polymer Translocation Pulled through a Narrow Pore

Debabrata Panja ^* and Gerard T. Barkema  

^* Institute for Theoretical Physics, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Institute for Theoretical Physics, Universiteit Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands; and Instituut-Lorentz, Universiteit Leiden, Leiden, The Netherlands

Correspondence: Address reprint requests to Debabrata Panja, E-mail: dpanja{at}science.uva.nl.

We study the passage times of a translocating polymer of length N in three dimensions, while it is pulled through a narrow pore with a constant force F applied to one end of the polymer. At small to moderate forces, satisfying the condition FN/k_BT 1, where 0.588 is the Flory exponent for the polymer, we find that _N, the mean time the polymer takes to leave the pore, scales as N²⁺ independent of F, in agreement with our earlier result for F = 0. At strong forces, i.e., for, FN/k_BT >> 1, the behavior of the passage time crosses over to _N N²/F. We show here that these behaviors stem from the polymer dynamics at the immediate vicinity of the pore—in particular, the memory effects in the polymer chain tension imbalance across the pore.