Tuning Adsorption Duration To Control the Diffusion of a Nanoparticle in Adsorbing Polymers

Controlling the nanoparticle (NP) diffusion in polymers is a prerequisite to obtain polymer nanocomposites (PNCs) with desired dynamical and rheological properties and to achieve targeted delivery of nanomedicine in biological systems. Here we determine the suppression mechanism of direct NP-polymer attraction to hamper the NP mobility in adsorbing polymers and then quantify the dependence of the effective viscosity η_eff felt by the NP on the adsorption duration τ_ads of polymers on the NP using scaling theory analysis and molecular dynamics simulations. We propose and confirm that participation of adsorbed chains in the NP motion break up at time intervals beyond τ_ads due to the rearrangement of polymer segments at the NP surface, which accounts for the onset of Fickian NP diffusion on a time scale of t ≈ τ_ads. We develop a power law, η_eff ∼ (τ_ads)^ν, where ν is the scaling exponent of the dependence of polymer coil size on the chain length, which leads to a theoretical basis for the design of PNCs and nanomedicine with desired applications through tuning the polymer adsorption duration.