Effect of bending stiffness on the polymer adsorption onto a heterogeneous stripe-patterned surface

Abstract

Adsorption of a single homopolymer chain with bending stiffness onto a heterogeneous regular stripe-patterned surface consisting of adsorbing and non-adsorbing stripes is studied theoretically in the framework of the lattice model and the generating functions approach. The stiffness is introduced by assigning a statistical weight to a trans-isomer (a straight segment) with respect to a gauche-isomer (a kink). The temperature is taken as the main control parameter since it affects both the strength of the monomer units’ attraction to the adsorbing stripes and the chain stiffness. It is shown that the adsorption transition temperature is a non-monotonic function on the bending energy having a minimum. The position of this minimum depends on the stripes’ width and only slightly deviates from zero bending energy. Temperature dependences of the main conformational and thermodynamic characteristics of the adsorbed chain are obtained. It is demonstrated that in most of the studied cases the adsorption is accompanied by the chain localization on a single adsorbing unit stripe and the chain stiffness enhances this effect.