Abstract

We investigated how very strong confinement, smaller than the polymer persistence length lp, affects the isotropic–nematic transition for semiflexible polymer solutions using GPU-accelerated Langevin dynamics. Walls facilitate polymer alignment, and under strong quasi-two-dimensional slitlike confinement, the I–N transition is found to be a continuous transition occurring via capillary nematization. We found that the I–N transition in the slit is a second-order transition, and the transition volume fraction ϕcr decreases with decrease of the slit height H. For H < lp, the critical exponent of the order parameter is found to be β ≈ 0.3–0.5. β sharply increases for H higher than a critical height, indicating the onset of a different wall-induced phase transition. Higher ϕcr are found for larger H, which is associated with increased monomer packing near the walls and correspond to the partial wetting transition predicted by self-consistent field theory.

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