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Updated: May 27, 2026

Preparation of Thermoresponsive Nanostructured Surfaces for Tissue Engineering
Published on: March 1, 2016
Thermodynamics of polymer adsorption to a flexible membrane
Steffen Karalus1, Wolfhard Janke, Michael Bachmann
1Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Leipzig, Postfach 100 920, D-04009 Leipzig, Germany. karalus@thp.uni-koeln.de
Abstract:
We analyze the structural behavior of a single polymer chain grafted to an attractive, flexible surface. Our model is composed of a coarse-grained bead-and-spring polymer and a tethered membrane. By means of extensive parallel tempering Monte Carlo simulations it is shown that the system exhibits a rich phase behavior ranging from highly ordered, compact to extended random coil structures, and from desorbed to completely adsorbed or even partially embedded conformations. These findings are summarized in a pseudophase diagram indicating the predominant class of conformations as a function of the external parameters temperature and polymer-membrane interaction strength. By comparison with adsorption to a stiff membrane surface it is shown that the flexibility of the membrane gives rise to qualitatively new behavior such as stretching of adsorbed conformations.
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