Location of the Adsorption Transition for Lattice Polymers

TL;DR

This paper investigates the adsorption transition of lattice polymers interacting with surfaces, providing a new proof for the transition point in impenetrable cases and discussing open problems for penetrable surfaces.

Contribution

It offers a new proof that the adsorption transition occurs at a positive inverse temperature for impenetrable surfaces and discusses open problems for penetrable surfaces.

Findings

Transition occurs at positive β for impenetrable surfaces

New proof of Hammersley, Torrie, and Whittington (1982) result

Open problem: transition at β=0 for penetrable surfaces

Abstract

We consider various lattice models of polymers: lattice trees, lattice animals, and self-avoiding walks. The polymer interacts with a surface (hyperplane), receiving a unit energy reward for each site in the surface. There is an adsorption transition of the polymer at a critical value of $\beta$, the inverse temperature. We present a new proof of the result of Hammersley, Torrie, and Whittington (1982) that the transition occurs at a strictly positive value of $\beta$ when the surface is impenetrable, i.e. when the polymer is restricted to a half-space. In contrast, for a penetrable surface, it is an open problem to prove that the transition occurs at $\beta=0$ (i.e., infinite temperature). We reduce this problem to showing that the fraction of N-site polymers whose span is less than $N/\log^2 N$ is not too small.