A single polymer grafted to a porous membrane

¹  John-von-Neumann Institute for Computing, Forschungszentrum Jülich - D-52425 Jülich, Germany
²  Institute of Physics, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz - Staudinger Weg 7, D-55099 Mainz, Germany

Received: 22 August 2006
Accepted: 9 November 2006

Abstract

We study a single flexible chain molecule grafted to a membrane which has pores of size slightly larger than the monomer size. On both sides of the membrane there is the same solvent. When this solvent is good, i.e. when the polymer is described by a self-avoiding walk, it can fairly easily penetrate the membrane, so that the average number of membrane crossings tends, for chain length , to a positive constant. The average numbers of monomers on either side of the membrane diverges in this limit, although their ratio becomes infinite. For a poor solvent, in contrast, the entire polymer is located, for large N, on one side of the membrane. For good and for theta solvents (ideal polymers) we find scaling laws, whose exponents can in the latter case be easily understood from the behaviour of random walks.