Embedded conformon model of chain folding

The real-space renormalization-group technique is used to study the low lying energy states of a random copolymer composed of hydrophobic (H) and polar (P) beads on a simple cubic lattice. Application of a variety of boundary conditions to parts of the larger chain (embedded conformons) while progressively increasing the length scale gives the lowest energy states in agreement with exact calculations for a 17 bead chain with a random H,P sequence. These results are significant for studying minimalist models of the folding of complex molecules because the computation time is several orders of magnitude less than for other approaches.