Bibliographic Details
| Title: |
Adsorption of self-avoiding tethered membranes: A Monte Carlo simulation study. |
| Authors: |
Popova, Hristina1 karleva@ipc.bas.bg, Milchev, Andrey1 |
| Source: |
Journal of Chemical Physics. 12/7/2008, Vol. 129 Issue 21, p215103. 11p. 1 Diagram, 7 Graphs. |
| Subject Terms: |
*MONTE Carlo method software, *COMPUTER simulation, *BIOLOGICAL membranes, *ADSORPTION (Chemistry), *PARTICLES, *MONOMERS |
| Abstract: |
Adsorption of self-avoiding tethered membranes of hexagonal orientation on a solid impenetrable plane is studied by means of Monte Carlo computer simulations of a coarse-grained continuum model, varying the membrane linear size L and the strength ε of the short-range attractive wall potential. A second-order adsorption transition is found to take place at a critical strength of the adsorption potential εc, as predicted earlier for binding manifolds in the so-called strong fluctuating regime. By means of finite-size scaling analysis for membranes of size 5≤L≤30, containing 61≤N≤2611 monomers, we find that the critical crossover exponent for adsorption [lowercase_phi_synonym]≈0.60±0.01. Thus the fraction m of adsorbed segments at εc is found to scale as m∝N[lowercase_phi_synonym]-1=N-0.4. The membrane thickness λmin decreases with growing strength ε of the adhesive potential as λmin∝|ε/εc-1|-ψ, where ψ≈0.58±0.02. The monomer density profiles of adsorbed membranes decay exponentially with the distance z from the substrate ρ(z)∝exp[-(z/ξ)], where the correlation length ξ∝|ε/εc-1|-ψ with ψ≈0.70±0.01. We also investigate the kinetics of adsorption of a polymerized membrane in the regime of strong adsorption and find that the order parameter variation with elapsed time during the adsorption process is given by a power law m(t)∝tω, where ω≈1.0, regardless of the strength of the adsorbing potential ε>εc. The characteristic time for complete adsorption in this regime scales as τads∝L2. Regarding the strength ε of the substrate potential, τads is found to diminish linearly as the respective equilibrium value of the order parameter increases. A simple analytic model yields also τads∝L2 while suggesting that the process of adsorption cannot be identified by simple “unrolling.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
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| Database: |
Academic Search Premier |