Modeling repulsive forces on fibres via knot energies
Modeling of repulsive forces is essential to the understanding of certain bio-physical processes, especially for the motion of DNA molecules. These kinds of phenomena seem to be driven by some sort of “energy” which especially prevents the molecules from strongly bending and forming self-intersections. Inspired by a physical toy model, numerous functionals have been defined during the past twenty-five years that aim at modeling self-avoidance. The general idea is to produce “detangled” curves having...