Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Zhu, Yu
• Kumar, P. B. Sunil
• Laradji, Mohamed

Titel

Conformational behavior and self-assembly of disjoint semi-flexible ring polymers adsorbed on solid substrates

Ist Teil von

• Soft matter, 2021-06, Vol.17 (21), p.5427-5435

Ort / Verlag

England: Royal Society of Chemistry

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The conformational behavior and spatial organization of self-avoiding semi-flexible ring polymers, that are fully adsorbed on solid substrates, are investigated via systematic coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations. Our results show that both conformations and spatial organization of the polymers depend strongly on their bending stiffness, κ , and on their areal number density, ρ . For ρ < ρ *, where ρ * is the overlap density, and for low values of κ , thermal fluctuations lead to weakly anisotropic instantaneous conformations of the polymers. The interplay between thermal fluctuations and polymer stiffness leads to a non-monotonic dependence of the polymers elongation on κ with a maximum elongation at some intermediate κ . Regardless of κ , the polymers elongation is almost independent of ρ for ρ ρ *, then increases with ρ . At ρ ρ * and high κ , the almost circularly-shaped polymers self-assemble into a triangular lattice with quasi-long range order. For ρ above ρ * and high κ , crowding of the polymers leads to their self-assembly into liquid-crystalline phases. In particular, for ρ moderately above ρ * and high κ , the polymer conformations are obround and self-assemble into domains with smectic-A-like order. At higher densities, the polymer have a biconcave geometry and self-assemble into domains with smectic-C-like order. The conformational behavior and spatial organization of disjoint semi-flexible ring polymers, which are fully adsorbed on solid substrates, are strongly affected by the combined effects of bending stiffness and areal density.