Density functional approach for inhomogeneous star polymers

TL;DR

This paper develops a microscopic density functional theory tailored for inhomogeneous star polymers, integrating fundamental measure theory and Wertheim's perturbation theory to model their structure and interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel density functional approach for star polymers that accounts for inhomogeneity and connectivity, extending existing theories to complex polymer architectures.

Findings

Provides a theoretical framework for star polymer inhomogeneity

Combines fundamental measure theory with Wertheim's perturbation theory

Lays groundwork for future extensions to varied arm lengths

Abstract

We propose microscopic density functional theory for inhomogeneous star polymers. Our approach is based on fundamental measure theory for hard spheres, and on Wertheim's first- and second-order perturbation theory for the interparticle connectivity. For simplicity we consider a model in which all the arms are of the same length, but our approach can be easily extended to the case of stars with arms of arbitrary lengths.