{"paper":{"title":"Thermalized buckling of extensible, semiflexible polymers","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"Thermal fluctuations make the critical buckling strain of semiflexible polymers increase with length.","cross_cats":["cond-mat.mes-hall","cond-mat.mtrl-sci","cond-mat.soft"],"primary_cat":"cond-mat.stat-mech","authors_text":"David R. Nelson, Richard Huang, Suraj Shankar","submitted_at":"2026-01-06T02:10:10Z","abstract_excerpt":"The Euler buckling of rods is a long-studied mechanical instability, and it remains relevant to this day, as the constituent components in many biological and physical systems are linear polymers, such as microtubules or carbon nanotubes. At finite temperature, if a polymer is shorter than its persistence length, the polymer is semiflexible, and its elasticity remains rod-like. But polymers can also stretch due to their finite extensibility, which can couple to energetically cheap bending deformations in nonlinear ways when a load is applied to the system. We show how the interplay between the"},"claims":{"count":4,"items":[{"kind":"strongest_claim","text":"Both perturbative calculations and numerical Monte Carlo simulations suggest a qualitative change in several scaling properties of the buckling transition. The critical compressional strain for thermal buckling now increases with system size... thermal buckling is controlled by a new fixed point with different critical exponents compared to classical Euler buckling.","source":"verdict.strongest_claim","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C1","attestation":"unclaimed"},{"kind":"weakest_assumption","text":"The polymer is treated as an extensible worm-like chain whose bending and stretching modes couple nonlinearly under fixed end-to-end strain, with thermal fluctuations treated perturbatively around the Euler state.","source":"verdict.weakest_assumption","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C2","attestation":"unclaimed"},{"kind":"one_line_summary","text":"Thermal fluctuations in extensible semiflexible polymers produce a buckling transition whose critical compressional strain increases with system size and is controlled by a new renormalization-group fixed point with altered exponents.","source":"verdict.one_line_summary","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C3","attestation":"unclaimed"},{"kind":"headline","text":"Thermal fluctuations make the critical buckling strain of semiflexible polymers increase with length.","source":"verdict.pith_extraction.headline","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C4","attestation":"unclaimed"}],"snapshot_sha256":"7bc6d026ec6512a53fff6c6d023e530d46b2d5d10e716b3542585fed0c0ffb9d"},"source":{"id":"2601.02654","kind":"arxiv","version":2},"verdict":{"id":"ef12664f-63dc-4c73-926b-ec020f38a9e2","model_set":{"reader":"grok-4.3"},"created_at":"2026-05-16T17:36:13.469866Z","strongest_claim":"Both perturbative calculations and numerical Monte Carlo simulations suggest a qualitative change in several scaling properties of the buckling transition. The critical compressional strain for thermal buckling now increases with system size... thermal buckling is controlled by a new fixed point with different critical exponents compared to classical Euler buckling.","one_line_summary":"Thermal fluctuations in extensible semiflexible polymers produce a buckling transition whose critical compressional strain increases with system size and is controlled by a new renormalization-group fixed point with altered exponents.","pipeline_version":"pith-pipeline@v0.9.0","weakest_assumption":"The polymer is treated as an extensible worm-like chain whose bending and stretching modes couple nonlinearly under fixed end-to-end strain, with thermal fluctuations treated perturbatively around the Euler state.","pith_extraction_headline":"Thermal fluctuations make the critical buckling strain of semiflexible polymers increase with length."},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2601.02654/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":53,"sample":[{"doi":"","year":null,"title":"Thermal Isometric","work_id":"f29794ec-ef76-4a49-84a2-79ff7d7a4d5e","ref_index":1,"cited_arxiv_id":"","is_internal_anchor":false},{"doi":"","year":null,"title":"ϵ0 + 1 2 ϵ2 0 + 1 2L0 Z L0 0 dh dx 2 dx #2 + Y 2 Z L0 0","work_id":"a675177f-ddd3-4450-a29c-e52246d879e7","ref_index":2,"cited_arxiv_id":"","is_internal_anchor":false},{"doi":"","year":2003,"title":"M. Rubinstein and R. H. Colby,Polymer physics(Oxford university press, 2003)","work_id":"2128572a-1f80-48ae-852d-215ee1ecbe65","ref_index":3,"cited_arxiv_id":"","is_internal_anchor":false},{"doi":"","year":1996,"title":"S. B. Smith, Y. Cui, and C. Bustamante, Overstretch- ing b-dna: the elastic response of individual double- stranded and single-stranded dna molecules, Science271, 795 (1996)","work_id":"48ab03dd-9f22-4f45-9c11-c75af086f3c1","ref_index":4,"cited_arxiv_id":"","is_internal_anchor":false},{"doi":"","year":2015,"title":"M. K. Blees, A. W. Barnard, P. A. Rose, S. P. Roberts, K. L. McGill, P. Y. Huang, A. R. Ruyack, J. W. Kevek, B. Kobrin, D. A. Muller,et al., Graphene kirigami, Na- ture524, 204 (2015)","work_id":"c3889544-6181-4f5c-8112-f4e2448bc71f","ref_index":5,"cited_arxiv_id":"","is_internal_anchor":false}],"resolved_work":53,"snapshot_sha256":"5b96b7d51e20b51ce8d189a9f0a29b8020d67426ccf5de9be42ccadf101d416e","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}