Simulation study on the adsorption of polymer chains on checkerboard‐patterned surfaces

The adsorption behavior of polymer chains on a checkerboard-patterned surface consisting of attractive and neutral square blocks is simulated using dynamic Monte Carlo method. The polymer chain is adsorbed on the surface below the critical adsorption temperature T-c and finally form a recognizable state below the pattern recognition temperature T-r. Both T-c and T-r increase with increasing the block width L. The increase of T-c is because that the effect of neutral blocks reduces with increasing L, while the increase of T-r indicates that it is easy for the adsorbed polymer chain to recognize large pattern. Moreover, below T-c, the polymer chain is in a multi-block adsorption state (MBAS) and multi-block recognition state (MBRS) for small L and in a single-block adsorption state (SBAS) and single-block recognition state (SBRS) for large L. For moderate L, as the temperature decreases, the polymer changes from the SBAS to the MBAS or from SBRS to MBRS below the single-block to multi-block adsorption temperature T-sm. T-c and T-sm increase with increasing N, whereas T-r decreases with increasing N. Lastly, the intra-polymer attraction helps the polymer chain to recognize in a SBRS.