Adsorption of Semiflexible Polymers on Flat, Homogeneous Surfaces

Abstract

We investigated the problem of adsorption of a single semiflexible polymer chain on to a planar, homogeneous surface using off-lattice Monte Carlo simulations. Adsorption characteristics were studied at different temperatures for chains of various stiffnesses. We have found that the stiffer chains adsorb more onto the surface and the adsorption transition takes place at a higher temperature when compared to that of the flexible chains. As stiffness increases, the adsorption transition is found to be sharper. The computed persistence length is found to grow linearly for small values of the bending energy, while for higher values, it shows a square root dependence. In the ground state, the parallel size of the stiffer chain is found to be much larger than that of the corresponding flexible polymer chain. The classical scaling laws for the flexible chains were tested for the stiffer chains and found that they are well obeyed, indicating that the universal properties of the chain measured over its whole dimension are unaffected by the local stiffness of the chain.