Confinement, curvature, and attractive interaction effects on polymer surface adsorption
W Chien and YL Chen, JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL PHYSICS, 147, 064901 (2017).
DOI: 10.1063/1.4996738
We investigate the conformation and dynamics of a semi-flexible polymer near an attractive plane or a cylindrical post using Langevin dynamics. We characterize the transition from the desorbed to absorbed state and quantify how absorption depends on the attraction interaction, polymer molecular weight, polymer flexibility, intra-polymer interaction, and micro-confinement. We find that the critical point of adsorption for ideal flexible polymers only weakly depends on confinement. However, the critical point of adsorption increases significantly for self-avoiding flexible polymers and under confinement, deviating from scaling theory predictions. These findings provide insights into DNA surface adsorption in nanoslits and nanochannels. Published by AIP Publishing.
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