Critical adsorption of copolymer tethered on selective surfaces

Critical adsorption behaviors of flexible copolymer chains tethered to a flat homogeneous surface are studied by using Monte Carlo simulations. We have compared the critical adsorption temperature Tc, estimated by a finite-size scaling method, for different AB copolymer sequences with A the attractive monomer and B the inert monomer. We find that Tc increases with an increase in the fraction of monomers A, fA, in copolymers, and it increases with an increase in the length of block A for the same fA. In particular, Tc of copolymer (AnBn)r can be expressed as a function of the block length, n, and Tc of copolymer (AnB)r and (ABm)r can be expressed as a linear function of fA. Tc of random copolymer chains also can be expressed as a linear function of fA and it can be estimated by using weight-average of Tc of different diblocks in the random copolymer. However, the crossover exponent is roughly independent of AB sequence distributions either for block copolymers or for random copolymers.