IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/eurphb/v11y1999i1p101-11910.1007-s100510050921.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Polymer depletion interaction between a particle and a wall

Author

Listed:
  • A. Bringer
  • E. Eisenriegler
  • F. Schlesener
  • A. Hanke

Abstract

The attractive depletion interaction between a spherical particle and a planar wall in a dilute solution of long flexible nonadsorbing free polymer chains is found to depend crucially on the particle to polymer size ratio ρ. While the polymer-induced force between particle and wall decreases monotonically with increasing distance for large ρ, for small ρ it has a maximum at a distance of the order of the polymer size. For ideal chains we study the crossover from large to small ρ behavior in full quantitative detail. Besides the free energy of interaction and the force, we also discuss the spatial variations of the densities of chain-ends and chain-monomers near the wall and particle. Two independent procedures, (1) solving directly the diffusion equation for the density of ends in terms of planar and spherical waves and (2) minimizing the Ginzburg-Landau functional of the “magnetic analog” of the polymer problem, are used to obtain results numerically for a broad range of ratios of the three lengths particle size, polymer size and distance of particle from the wall. Besides previously known cases, we find two more interesting limiting regions of the length ratios for which analytical results can be obtained. Copyright Società Italiana di Fisica, Springer-Verlag 1999

Suggested Citation

  • A. Bringer & E. Eisenriegler & F. Schlesener & A. Hanke, 1999. "Polymer depletion interaction between a particle and a wall," The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Springer;EDP Sciences, vol. 11(1), pages 101-119, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:eurphb:v:11:y:1999:i:1:p:101-119:10.1007/s100510050921
    DOI: 10.1007/s100510050921
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s100510050921
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s100510050921?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:eurphb:v:11:y:1999:i:1:p:101-119:10.1007/s100510050921. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.