Conformational Properties of Polymer Mushrooms Under Spherical and Cylindrical Confinement

A coarse grained model of a flexible macromolecule end‐grafted on the inside of a sphere or a cylinder under good solvent conditions is studied by Monte Carlo simulations. For cylindrical confinement, two regimes are found: when the cylinder radius R exceeds the gyration radius R go of the polymer mushroom grafted to a planar surface, a simple scaling description holds. In the opposite case, a non‐monotonic crossover to a cigar‐like quasi‐one‐dimensional structure occurs, and the distribution P e ( x ) of the free chain end in the x ‐direction along the cylinder axis becomes bimodal. Spherical confinement, on the other hand, causes a crossover from dilute to semidilute behavior of the structural properties.