title: Spherical polymer brushes under good solvent conditions: molecular dynamics results compared to density functional theory.
abstract: A coarse grained model for flexible polymers end-grafted to repulsive spherical nanoparticles is studied for various chain lengths and grafting densities under good solvent conditions by molecular dynamics methods and density functional theory. With increasing chain length, the monomer density profile exhibits a crossover to the star polymer limit. The distribution of polymer ends and the linear dimensions of individual polymer chains are obtained, while the inhomogeneous stretching of the chains is characterized by the local persistence lengths. The results on the structure factor of both single chain and full spherical brush as well as the range of applicability of the different theoretical tools are presented. Finally, a brief discussion of the experiment is given.
authors.affiliation: Institut für Physik, Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, D-55099 Mainz, Germany. loverso@uni-mainz.de
authors.forename: Federica
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Lo Verso
authors.forename: Sergei A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Egorov
authors.forename: Andrey
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Milchev
authors.forename: Kurt
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Binder
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D015394:Molecular Structure; D053758:Nanoparticles / Q000737:chemistry; D011108:Polymers / Q000737:chemistry*; D012997:Solvents / Q000737:chemistry
chemical_list: D011108:Polymers; D012997:Solvents