Lattice polymers near a permeable interface

Abstract

We study the localisation of lattice polymer models near a permeable interface in two dimensions. Localisation can arise due to an interaction between the polymer and the interface, and can be altered by a preference for the bulk solvent on one side or by the application of a force to manipulate the polymer. Different combinations of these three effects give slightly different statistical mechanical behaviours. The canonical lattice model of polymers is the self-avoiding walk which we mainly study with Monte Carlo simulation to calculate the phase diagram and critical phenomena. For comparison, a solvable directed walk version is also defined and the phase diagrams are compared for each case. We find broad agreement between the two models, and most minor differences can be understood as due to the different entropic contributions. In the limit where the bulk solvent on one side is overwhelmingly preferred we see how the localisation transition transforms to the adsorption transition; the permeable interface becomes effectively an impermeable surface.

arXiv comment18 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Calculation of the connective constant for self-avoiding walks via the pivot algorithm
• Universality of crossover scaling for the adsorption transition of lattice polymers
• Parallel PERM
• Adsorbed self-avoiding walks subject to a force
• Location of the Adsorption Transition for Lattice Polymers
• The critical pulling force for self-avoiding walks
• Critical behaviour of the extended-ballistic transition for pulled self-avoiding walks