Behavior of block-polyampholytes near a charged surface

Abstract

The behavior of polyampholytes near a charged planar surface is studied by means of Monte Carlo simulations. The investigated polyampholytes are overall electrically neutral and made up of oppositely charged units (called blocks) that are highly charged and of the the same length. The influence of block length and substrate's surface-charge-density on the adsorption behavior is addressed. A detailed structural study, including local monomer concentration, monomer mean height, transversal chain size, interface-bond orientation correlation, is provided. It is demonstrated that adsorption is favored for long enough blocks and/or high enough Coulomb interface-ion couplings. By explicitly measuring the chain size in the bulk, it is shown that the charged interface induces either a swelling or a shrinkage of the transversal dimension of the chain depending, in a non trivial manner, on the block length.

arXiv comment23 pages - 10 eps figs. Submitted for publication

References in corpus (5)

• Strong-Coupling Theory for Counter-Ion Distributions
• Scaling Laws of Polyelectrolyte Adsorption
• Adsorption and Depletion of Polyelectrolytes from Charged Surfaces
• Effect of Image Forces on Polyelectrolyte Adsorption at a Charged Surface
• Behavior of rod-like polyelectrolytes near an oppositely charged surface

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Semiflexible Polyampholyte Brushes - The Effect of Charged Monomers Sequence
• Brushes of flexible, semiflexible and rodlike diblock polyampholytes: Molecular dynamics simulation and scaling analysis