Stretching of a chain polymer adsorbed at a surface

TL;DR

This study uses advanced simulations to analyze how a surface-adsorbed polymer responds to stretching forces, revealing detailed phase behavior across various temperatures and forces.

Contribution

It introduces the application of the flatPERM algorithm to efficiently compute the phase diagram of an adsorbed polymer under force.

Findings

Phase diagram of adsorbed polymer under force mapped out.

The flatPERM algorithm effectively computes the density of states.

Simulations conducted on systems up to 256 steps.

Abstract

In this paper we present simulations of a surface-adsorbed polymer subject to an elongation force. The polymer is modelled by a self-avoiding walk on a regular lattice. It is confined to a half-space by an adsorbing surface with attractions for every vertex of the walk visiting the surface, and the last vertex is pulled perpendicular to the surface by a force. Using the recently proposed flatPERM algorithm, we calculate the phase diagram for a vast range of temperatures and forces. The strength of this algorithm is that it computes the complete density of states from one single simulation. We simulate systems of sizes up to 256 steps.