Self-avoiding Walks and Polymer Adsorption

Self-avoiding walks on a d-dimensional hypercubic lattice are used to model a polymer interacting with a surface. One can choose to weight the walk by the number of vertices or the number of edges on the surface and define the free energy of the polymer using equilibrium statistical mechanics. We loo...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Rychlewski, Gregory
Other Authors: Whittington, Stuart
Language:en_ca
Published: 2011
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1807/27359
Description
Summary:Self-avoiding walks on a d-dimensional hypercubic lattice are used to model a polymer interacting with a surface. One can choose to weight the walk by the number of vertices or the number of edges on the surface and define the free energy of the polymer using equilibrium statistical mechanics. We look at the behaviour of the free energy in the limit that temperature goes to zero and also derive inequalities relating the critical points of the two weighting schemes. A combined model with weights associated with both the number of vertices and the number of edges on the surface is investigated and the properties of its phase diagram are explored. Finally, we look at Motzkin paths and partially-directed walks in the combined edge and vertex model and compare their results to the self-avoiding walk’s.