The effect of attractive monomer-monomer interactions on adsorption of a polymer chain

Abstract

The authors have used transfer matrix techniques to study a model of polymer adsorption and collapse. They consider the conventional model of a self-avoiding walk with attractive nearest-neighbour interactions on the square lattice and introduce adsorbing boundaries. The numerical results are consistent with the existence of a multicritical point where the adsorption and collapse transitions coincide and suggest that the adsorption transition of a collapsed polymer chain in first order. There is also clear evidence that the collapse transition lowers the adsorption temperature. Estimates of the surface scaling dimensions at the ordinary- Theta transition support the conjecture of Seno and Stella (1988) that the surface critical behaviour at the Theta and Theta ' points belong to different universality classes.