1307.7337 (Panayotis Benetatos et al.)

Bundling in brushes of directed and semiflexible polymers    [PDF]

Panayotis Benetatos, Eugene M. Terentjev, Annette Zippelius

We explore the effect of an attractive interaction between parallel aligned polymers, which are perpendicularly grafted on a substrate. Such an attractive interaction could, e.g., be due to reversible cross-links. The competition between permanent grafting favoring a homogeneous state of the polymer brush and the attraction, which tends to induce in-plane collapse of the aligned polymers, gives rise to an instability of the homogeneous phase to a bundled state. In this latter state the in-plane translational symmetry is spontaneously broken and the density is modulated with a finite wavelength, which is set by the length scale of transverse fluctuations of the grafted polymers. We analyse the instability for two models of aligned polymers: directed polymers with a line tension and weakly bending chains with a bending stiffness.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.7337