Polymers Near Surfaces

The main focus of this book is on recent theoretical developments concerning the interesting limit of long flexible polymer chains in extreme dilution where the behaviour becomes "universal", i.e. independent of most details and dependent only upon a few basic properties of the effective monomer-surface and monomer-monomer interactions. While the simplest case of ideal chains serves for an introduction, the main part of the book treats the more realistic situation of chains with self-interaction (excluded volume or theta). Emphasis is put on the close relation to critical behaviour of spin systems (or local field theories) with a surface. It is pointed out that powerful recent developments for these latter systems such as the ("field theoretic") "renormalization group", "short distance expansion" and "conformal invariance" are extremely valuable and flexible tools to understand the physics of polymer conformations near surfaces. This book gives a self-contained introduction into these more advanced approaches as well as to their application to polymer physics. Only basic knowledge in statistical mechanics is assumed. In this way a number of interesting properties such as grafted chain behaviour and density profiles of solutions can be discussed in detail for the three basic surface states nonadsorbed, adsorbed, and adsorption threshold and for different types of interactions (ideal, good solvent, theta solvent) in bulk. Open chains as well as ring polymers are considered. The results are obtained in terms of universal power law exponents, amplitude ratios and scaling functions. Also crossover in between different types of behaviour is discussed. Due to its interdisciplinary point of view, the book should be of interest for workers and graduate students in the field of polymer physics as well as for those working in statistical mechanics, critical phenomena and field theory.