Surface phase transitions in polymer systems

Abstract

Self-avoiding walks, lattice trees, and related geometrical models provide a link between the physics of polymers and the study of critical phenomena. In particular, these models in the presence of a surface provide insight into surface adsorption in dilute polymer systems in a good solvent. The theme of this review is the influence of polymer structure (topology) on the critical properties of these models. Emphasis is placed on recent results by rigorous methods, scaling theory, and conformal covariance theory. Numerical results that may be used to test the predictions of scaling of scaling and conformal covariance theories are also summarized. Related topics such as the adsorption of directed polymers, the semidilute regime, the theta point and theta solvents, and percolation (polymer gels) are briefly discussed in the final section.