Probing Dynamics of a Magnetic Colloidal Chain Confined in a Spherical Cavity

Behaviors and conformational properties of semi-flexible macromolecular chains can provide insight of understanding some fundamental polymer dynamics such as chain entanglement or the cellular processes such as DNA replication or viral transfection. We conduct a study of such confined system via magnetically driven colloidal chains under confinement. We present a bead-spring model to describe the confinement dynamics inside a spherical cavity using coarse-grained Brownian Dynamics simulation. Radial contraction is employed as the confining procedure, and a possible rotating magnetic field will be introduced to actuate dynamics in the system. We aim to study the conformational properties of confined semiflexible colloidal chain with respect to the contraction rate in both weak and strong confinement regimes, and discuss the change of dynamics along the chain when a short-ranged wall interaction is present.