Large scale behavior of semiflexible heteropolymers

We consider a general discrete model for heterogeneous semiflexible polymer chains. Both the thermal noise and the inhomogeneous character of the chain (the disorder) are modeled in terms of random rotations. We focus on the quenched regime, i.e., the analysis is performed for a given realization of the disorder. Semiflexible models differ substantially from random walks on short scales, but on large scales a Brownian behavior emerges. By exploiting techniques from tensor analysis and non-commutative Fourier analysis, we establish the Brownian character of the model on large scales and we obtain an expression for the diffusion constant. We moreover give conditions yielding quantitative mixing properties. © Association des Publications de l'Institut Henri Poincaré, 2010.