Polymer-decorated tethered membranes under good- and poor-solvent conditions |
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| Authors: | M Werner and J -U Sommer |
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| Institution: | (1) AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, Vienna, Austria;(2) Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, Singapore, Singapore;(3) Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, Kent Ridge, Singapore;(4) Department of Forensic Medicine, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany;(5) Max-Planck-Institute for Polymer Research, Mainz, Germany;(6) Department of Chemical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;(7) Dept. of Chemistry, University of Bath, Bath, United Kingdom;(8) Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser, Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas Heraklion, Crek, Greece;(9) Nanoscale Imaging Center, Purdue University, Indianapolis, IN, USA;(10) Dept. of Microsystem, Engineering, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany;(11) FRIAS, Freiburg, Germany |
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| Abstract: | We study tethered membranes grafted by polymer chains on one side. Mean-field and scaling arguments predicting a spontaneous
curvature are compared to the results of lattice-based Monte Carlo simulations using the Bond Fluctuation Model, which are
carried out for various grafting densities and chain lengths. We show that already slightly overlapping chains bend the membrane
significantly. This proves the entropic origin for the bending stiffness, which is of order kT . To understand the membrane curvature under conditions of very small bending stiffness we apply a geometrical model which
takes into account the state of chains at the overlap threshold. Applying a thermal solvent model for the grafted chains,
we demonstrate that the bending direction of the membrane can be triggered by variation of the solvent quality. This indicates
that polymer-decorated membranes may serve as switchable nanoscale devices. |
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