Tension dynamics in semiflexible polymers. I. Coarse-grained equations of motion

Based on the wormlike chain model, a coarse-grained description of
the nonlinear dynamics of a weakly bending semiflexible polymer is
developed. By means of a multiple-scale perturbation analysis, a
length-scale separation inherent to the weakly bending limit is
exploited to reveal the deterministic nature of the spatio temporal
relaxation of the backbone tension and to deduce the corresponding
coarse-grained equation of motion. From this partial
integro-differential equation, some detailed analytical predictions
for the nonlinear response of a weakly bending polymer are derived
in an accompanying paper O. Hallatschek , following paper, Phys.
Rev. E 75, 031906 (2007)].