Equilibrium and dynamical properties of polymer chains translocating through a rigid membrane

The translocation of macromolecules through a nanopore of a rigid membrane is a problem of great interest in soft matter physics both because is nowadays experimentally accessible and because of its potential applications in genomic and biopysics. By using the number of monomers belonging to one of the half space generated by the membrane as a reaction coordinate of the translocation process we aim at characterising the free energy of the system as a function of this coordinate. Analytic predictions based on scaling arguments can then be compared with molecular dynamics simulations of a coarse grained model of the system. This approach will be first carried out on liner and circular polymers and eventually on knotted configurations.