Study on the ground states of a square-lattice polymer by using exhaustive enumeration

초록

We exhaustively enumerate the ground-state conformations of polymers with attractive nearest-neighbor interactions on a square lattice. We find that when the ground-state number is considered as a function of the chain length, local minima appear at magic lengths. However, the ground-state entropy per monomer does not vanish in the thermodynamic limit when an extrapolation is performed with the magic-length data, implying that the number of ground-state conformations grows exponentially. We also study the entropy difference between the ground and the first-excited states. The entropy difference per monomer diverges in the thermodynamic limit, indicating that the zero-tail of the specific heat is modified in the thermodynamic limit.

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