Conformation-networks of two-dimensional lattice homopolymers

The effect of different Monte Carlo move sets on the folding kinetics of lattice polymer chains is studied from the geometry of the conformation-network. The networks have the characteristics of small-world: the local connections are more clustered than that of the corresponding random lattices, and the characteristic path lengths increase logarithmically with the number of nodes. One of the elementary moves, rigid rotation, has drastic effect on the geometric properties of the network. The move increases greatly the connections and reduces significantly the shortest path lengths between conformations. Including rigid rotation to the move set results in the increase of the dimensionality of the conformation space to the value about 4.