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Many-body contacts in fractal polymer chains and fractional Brownian trajectories
We calculate the probabilities that a trajectory of a fractional Brownian motion with arbitrary fractal dimension df visits the same spot n≥3 times, at given moments t1,...,tn, and obtain a determinant expression for these probabilities in terms of a displacement-displacement covariance matrix. Except for the standard Brownian trajectories with df=2, the resulting many-body contact probabilities cannot be factorized into a product of single-loop contributions. Within a Gaussian network model of a self-interacting polymer chain, which we suggested recently [K. Polovnikov et al., Soft Matter 14, 6561 (2018)], the probabilities we calculate here can be interpreted as probabilities of multibody contacts in a fractal polymer conformation with the same fractal dimension df. This Gaussian approach, which implies a mapping from fractional Brownian motion trajectories to polymer conformations, can be used as a semiquantitative model of polymer chains in topologically stabilized conformations, e.g., in melts of unconcatenated rings or in the chromatin fiber, which is the material medium containing genetic information. The model presented here can be used, therefore, as a benchmark for interpretation of the data of many-body contacts in genomes, which we expect to be available soon in, e.g., Hi-C experiments.