Rod-like Polyelectrolyte Brushes with Mono- and Multivalent Counterions

Abstract

A model of rod-like polyelectrolyte brushes in the presence of monovalent and multivalent counterions but with no added-salt is studied using Monte Carlo simulation. The average height of the brush, the histogram of rod conformations, and the counterion density profile are obtained for different values of the grafting density of the charge-neutral wall. For a domain of grafting densities, the brush height is found to be relatively insensitive to the density due to a competition between counterion condensation and inter-rod repulsion. In this regime, multivalent counterions collapse the brush in the form of linked clusters. Nematic order emerges at high grafting densities, resulting is an abrupt increase of the brush height.

7 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (7)

• The `Friction' of Vacuum, and other Fluctuation-Induced Forces
• Brush Effects on DNA Chips: Thermodynamics, Kinetics and Design Guidlines
• Effect of Mono- and Multivalent Salts on Angle-dependent Attractions between Charged Rods
• Monte-Carlo simulations of star-branched polyelectrolyte micelles
• Raft Instability of Biopolymer Gels
• Effects of counterion fluctuations in a polyelectrolyte brush
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• Brushes of flexible, semiflexible and rodlike diblock polyampholytes: Molecular dynamics simulation and scaling analysis
• Aggregation kinetics of stiff polyelectrolytes in the presence of multivalent salt
• Orientationally ordered aggregates of stiff polyelectrolytes in the presence of multivalent salt
• Electrostatic Correlation Augmented Self-Consistent Field Theory and Its Application to Polyelectrolyte Brushes
• Solvation force between tethered polyelectrolyte layers. A density functional approach