Shifting the Isotropic–Nematic Transition in Very Strongly Confined Semiflexible Polymer Solutions

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• 作者：Dmytro A. Luzhbin ; Yeng-Long Chen
• 刊名：Macromolecules
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：August 23, 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：49
• 期：16
• 页码：6139-6147
• 全文大小：591K
• 年卷期：0
• ISSN：1520-5835

文摘

We investigated how very strong confinement, smaller than the polymer persistence length l_p, affects the isotropic–nematic transition for semiflexible polymer solutions using GPU-accelerated Langevin dynamics. Walls facilitate polymer alignment, and under strong quasi-two-dimensional slitlike confinement, the I–N transition is found to be a continuous transition occurring via capillary nematization. We found that the I–N transition in the slit is a second-order transition, and the transition volume fraction ϕ_cr decreases with decrease of the slit height H. For H < l_p, the critical exponent of the order parameter is found to be β ≈ 0.3–0.5. β sharply increases for H higher than a critical height, indicating the onset of a different wall-induced phase transition. Higher ϕ_cr are found for larger H, which is associated with increased monomer packing near the walls and correspond to the partial wetting transition predicted by self-consistent field theory.