Effect of Bending Stiffness on a Homopolymer Inside a Spherical Cage

In this work we investigate the effect of bending stiffness on a homopolymer inside a spherical confinement. In particular we are interested in the collapse transition and its dependence on the size of the confinement and the stiffness of the polymer. Using an advanced multicanonical Monte Carlo algorithm, we sample the phase space of a coarse-grained homopolymer model. We find that the confinement leads to a shift of the collapse transition temperature with a stiffness-dependent direction: flexible polymers become more unstable for a smaller confinement in contrast to semi-flexible polymers, where the transition temperature increases with decreasing size of the confinement.