Noise effects in polymer dynamics

The study of the noise induced effects on the dynamics of a chain molecule crossing a potential barrier, in the presence of a metastable state, is presented. A two-dimensional stochastic version of the Rouse model for a flexible polymer has been adopted to mimic the molecular dynamics and to take into account the interactions between adjacent monomers. We obtain a nonmonotonic behavior of the mean first passage time and its standard deviation, of the polymer centre of inertia, with the noise intensity. These findings reveal a noise induced effect on the mean crossing time. The role of the polymer length is also investigated.