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Polymers in Slabs, Slits, and Pores
Author(s) -
Whittington Stuart G.,
Soteros Christine E.
Publication year - 1991
Publication title -
israel journal of chemistry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.908
H-Index - 54
eISSN - 1869-5868
pISSN - 0021-2148
DOI - 10.1002/ijch.199100014
Subject(s) - polymer , chemistry , confined space , slab , polymer adsorption , adsorption , entropy (arrow of time) , chemical physics , statistical physics , polymer architecture , lattice (music) , solvent , thermodynamics , physics , organic chemistry , geophysics , acoustics
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.