Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to give a brief introduction to the physical concepts for polymers interacting with surfaces and interfaces. In particular we introduce scaling and mean-field concepts for polymers in confinement, at adsorbing interfaces and surfaces and show how these simple models can be used to understand the diversity of surface and interface phenomena of polymers. After a short introduction to concepts of polymer physics, self-similarity of polymer conformations is introduced as the basics for scaling arguments. Then, mean-field concepts as a thermodynamic approach are presented as a versatile tool in polymer theory. Using these concepts the physics of polymer adsorption is explored. After consideration of adsorption of single chains, concentration and saturation at the substrate is discussed. Polymer brushes represent a particular class of substrate-fixed polymers displaying new features due to the highly stretched conformations. Mean-field concepts are used to explore the physics of charged brushes under different solvent conditions.
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Notes
- 1.
Every monotonic function, in particular a power-law function of the scaling variable is again a scaling variable.
- 2.
In fact it is exact in d = 1, 2 and 4.
- 3.
We note that the numerical prefactor \(a\) is different for different applications of the mean-field concept depending of the way the ideal elastic free energy is parametrized (radius of gyration, brush height etc.
- 4.
Such localization is called counterion condensation but shall be not considered in the following.
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The author thanks Jaroslav Paturej for critical reading of the manuscript.
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Sommer, JU. (2016). Polymer Physics at Surfaces and Interfaces. In: Lang, P., Liu, Y. (eds) Soft Matter at Aqueous Interfaces. Lecture Notes in Physics, vol 917. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24502-7_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24502-7_9
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