Lattice polymers near a permeable interface

TL;DR

This paper investigates how lattice polymers localize near a permeable interface in two dimensions, analyzing the effects of interactions, solvent preferences, and applied forces through simulations and comparisons of different models.

Contribution

It introduces a comparative study of self-avoiding walk and directed walk models to understand polymer localization near permeable interfaces, highlighting phase diagram similarities and differences.

Findings

Broad agreement between models on localization behavior

Localization transition becomes an adsorption transition under strong solvent preference

Monte Carlo simulations effectively map phase diagrams and critical phenomena

Abstract

We study the localisation of lattice polymer models near a permeable interface in two dimensions. Localisation can arise due to an interaction between the polymer and the interface, and can be altered by a preference for the bulk solvent on one side or by the application of a force to manipulate the polymer. Different combinations of these three effects give slightly different statistical mechanical behaviours. The canonical lattice model of polymers is the self-avoiding walk which we mainly study with Monte Carlo simulation to calculate the phase diagram and critical phenomena. For comparison, a solvable directed walk version is also defined and the phase diagrams are compared for each case. We find broad agreement between the two models, and most minor differences can be understood as due to the different entropic contributions. In the limit where the bulk solvent on one side is overwhelmingly preferred we see how the localisation transition transforms to the adsorption transition; the permeable interface becomes effectively an impermeable surface.