Polymers in Slabs, Slits, and Pores
Stuart G. Whittington, C E Soteros · Israel Journal of Chemistry · 1991
Abstract When a polymer is subject to a geometrical constraint, such as being confined to a pore, there may be a loss in configurational entropy. If a linear polymer is in dilute solution in a good solvent, then it can be modelled as a self‐avoiding walk on a lattice and, in this case, it is possible to make rigorous statements about this entropy loss. We shall discuss some of these results for self‐avoiding walks in a half‐space, a slab, a prism, etc. We then examine the dependence of this entropy loss on the architecture of the polymer and ask if ring or star or comb polymers all lose the same amount of entropy when confined in the same way. It turns out that this depends on the nature of the confinement. We also look at the case where a polymer interacts with a surface and investigate how the adsorption behavior depends on the architecture of the polymer. The behavior is strikingly different in two and in three dimensions.