Effects of an attractive wall on the translocation of polymer under driving

Abstract

The effects of an attractive wall at the trans side on the translocation of an eight-site bond-fluctuation model (BFM) polymer through a pore in a membrane under driving are simulated by the dynamic Monte Carlo method. The attractive wall shows two contrary effects: its excluded volume effect reduces configuration entropy and thus hinders the translocation of the polymer, while its attraction decreases the energy and thus accelerates the translocation. At a critical polymer–wall interaction ε* ≈− 1, we find that the two effects compensate each other and the translocation time τ is roughly independent of the separation distance between the wall and the pore. The value ε* ≈− 1 is roughly equal to the critical adsorption point for the BFM polymer. Moreover, the value of the critical attraction is roughly independent of chain length N and chemical potential difference Δμ. At last, a scaling relation τ ∼ Nα is observed for polymer translocation at a high value of NΔμ. Though the translocation time is highly dependent on the polymer–wall interaction and pore–wall separation distance, the exponent α is always about 1.30 ± 0.05 so long as NΔμ is large enough.