Stretching of a chain polymer adsorbed at a surface

Abstract

In this paper we present simulations of a surface-adsorbed polymer subject to an elongation force. The polymer is modelled by a self-avoiding walk on a regular lattice. It is confined to a half-space by an adsorbing surface with attractions for every vertex of the walk visiting the surface, and the last vertex is pulled perpendicular to the surface by a force. Using the recently proposed flatPERM algorithm, we calculate the phase diagram for a vast range of temperatures and forces. The strength of this algorithm is that it computes the complete density of states from one single simulation. We simulate systems of sizes up to 256 steps.