1. Shifting the Isotropic-Nematic Transition in Very Strongly Confined Semiflexible Polymer Solutions.
- Author
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Luzhbin, Dmytro A. and Yeng-Long Chen
- Subjects
- *
ISOTROPIC properties , *POLYMER solutions , *LANGEVIN equations , *PHASE transitions , *WETTING , *SELF-consistent field theory - Abstract
We investigated how very strong confinement, smaller than the polymer persistence length lp, 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 ϕcr decreases with decrease of the slit height H. For H > lp, 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 ϕcr 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2016
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