Thermodynamics of polymer adsorption to a flexible membrane

Abstract

We analyze the structural behavior of a single polymer chain grafted to an attractive, flexible surface. Our model is composed of a coarse-grained bead-and-spring polymer and a tethered membrane. By means of extensive parallel tempering Monte Carlo simulations it is shown that the system exhibits a rich phase behavior ranging from highly ordered, compact to extended random coil structures and from desorbed to completely adsorbed or even partially embedded conformations. These findings are summarized in a pseudophase diagram indicating the predominant class of conformations as a function of the external parameters temperature and polymer-membrane interaction strength. By comparison with adsorption to a stiff membrane surface it is shown that the flexibility of the membrane gives rise to qualitatively new behavior such as stretching of adsorbed conformations.

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• Surface effects in the crystallization process of elastic flexible polymers
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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Adsorption and Pattern Recognition of Polymers at Complex Surfaces with Attractive Stripe-like Motifs
• Polymer adsorption on a fractal substrate: numerical study
• Thermodynamics of the Adsorption of Flexible Polymers on Nanowires
• Effect of grafting on the binding transition of two flexible polymers