Effect of a force-free end on the mechanical property of a biopolymer–A path integral approach

We study the effect of a force-free end on the mechanical property of a stretched biopolymer. The system can be divided into two parts. The first part consists of the segment counted from the fixed point (i.e., the origin) to the forced point in the biopolymer, with arclength L_f. The second part consists of the segment counted from the forced point to the force-free end with arclength ΔL. We apply the path integral technique to find the relationship between these two parts. At finite temperature and without any constraint at the end, we show exactly that if we focus on the quantities related to the first part, then we can ignore the second part completely. Monte Carlo simulation confirms this conclusion. In contrast, the effect for the quantities related to the second part is dependent on what we want to observe. A force-free end has little effect on the relative extension, but it affects seriously the value of the end-to-end distance if ΔL is comparable to L_f.