Persistence-length renormalization of polymers in a crowded environment of hard disks.

The most conspicuous property of a semiflexible polymer is its persistence length, defined as the decay length of tangent correlations along its contour. Using an efficient stochastic growth algorithm to sample polymers embedded in a quenched hard-disk fluid, we find apparent wormlike chain statistics with a renormalized persistence length. We identify a universal form of the disorder renormalization that suggests itself as a quantitative measure of molecular crowding.