2011/10/28 by Michael G. Opferman, Rob D. Coalson, Opferman, Michael G. +5
Chemistry · Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Physical and Chemical Molecular Interactions #Electrohydrodynamics and Fluid Dynamics #FOS: Physical sciences #Material Dynamics and Properties #Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci) #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft) #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) #cond-mat.mtrl-sci #cond-mat.soft #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1110.6419
arxiv created 2011/10/28 · openalex publication_date 2011/10/28 · arxiv updated 2011/10/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Mixtures of nanoparticles and polymer-like objects are encountered in many nanotechnological applications and biological systems. We study the behavior of grafted polymer layers decorated by nanoparticles that are attracted to the polymers using lattice gas based mean field theory and accompanying coarse-grained Brownian dynamics simulations. We find that the presence of nanoparticles can induce large morphological transitions in the layer morphology. In particular, at moderate nanoparticle concentrations, the nanoparticles cause a reduction in the height of the polymer layer above the grafting surface, which occurs via a novel first-order phase transition for sufficiently strong attraction between the polymers and the nanoparticles and smoothly for weak attractions. The predictions of the theory qualitatively agree with the observed behavior of grafted natively unfolded protein strands upon binding of proteins. The results also inform ways of designing nanopolymer layer morphologies.