Polymer adsorption onto random planar surfaces: Interplay of polymer and surface correlation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how polymers adsorb onto heterogeneous surfaces with correlated disorder, deriving equations for the transition between adsorption and desorption, and showing the threshold is identical for quenched and annealed disorder, with implications for molecular recognition.

Contribution

It introduces a variational approach to derive simple equations for the adsorption transition on correlated disordered surfaces, highlighting the equivalence of quenched and annealed disorder thresholds.

Findings

Adsorption threshold is the same for quenched and annealed disorder.

Derived simple equations for the adsorption-desorption transition line.

Discussed implications for molecular recognition physics.

Abstract

We study the adsorption of homogeneous or heterogeneous polymers onto heterogeneous planar surfaces with exponentially decaying site-site correlations, using a variational reference system approach. As a main result, we derive simple equations for the adsorption-desorption transition line. We show that the adsorption threshold is the same for systems with quenched and annealed disorder. The results are discussed with respect to their implications for the physics of molecular recognition.