  The conformational properties of flexible and semiflexible polymers exposed
to active noise are studied theoretically. The noise may originate from the
interaction of the polymer with surround- ing active (Brownian) particles or
from the inherent motion of the polymer itself, which may be composed of active
Brownian particles. In the latter case, the respective monomers are indepen-
dently propelled in directions changing diffusively. For the description of the
polymer, we adopt the continuous Gaussian semiflexible polymer model.
Specifically, the finite polymer extensibility is taken into account which
turns out to be essentially for the polymer conformations. Our analytical
calculations predict a strong dependence of the relaxation times on the
activity. In particular, semi- flexible polymers exhibit a crossover from a
bending-elasticity-dominated to the flexible-polymer dynamics with increasing
activity. This leads to a significant noise-induced polymer shrinkage over a
large range of self-propulsion velocities. For large activities, the polymers
swell and their extension becomes comparable to the contour length. The scaling
properties of the mean square end-to-end distance with respect to the polymer
length and monomer activity are discussed.
