Simulational study of anomalous tracer diffusion in hydrogels

TL;DR

This study uses simulations to explore how tracer particles diffuse in hydrogels, revealing conditions that cause subdiffusive behavior, which could help analyze hydrogel network structures using fluorescence correlation spectroscopy.

Contribution

The paper introduces a simulation-based analysis of tracer diffusion in hydrogels, highlighting the impact of particle-network attraction on diffusion behavior.

Findings

Attraction to polymer strands can cause subdiffusion.

Subdiffusive behavior depends on specific conditions.

Potential application in hydrogel network analysis.

Abstract

In this article, we analyze different factors that affect the diffusion behavior of small tracer particles (as they are used e.g.in fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS)) in the polymer network of a hydrogel and perform simulations of various simplified models. We observe, that under certain circumstances the attraction of a tracer particle to the polymer network strands might cause subdiffusive behavior on intermediate time scales. In theory, this behavior could be employed to examine the network structure and swelling behavior of weakly crosslinked hydrogels with the help of FCS.