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Self-Avoiding Flexible Polymers under Spherical Confinement

2006; American Chemical Society; Volume: 6; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1021/nl052351n

1530-6992

Angelo Cacciuto, Erik Luijten,

Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics

We compute the free energy of confinement for a flexible self-avoiding polymer inside a spherical cavity. Accurate numerical results allow us to arbitrate between three competing scaling predictions. For moderate confinement, the free energy exhibits a power-law dependence on cavity size that is different from what is observed for planar and cylindrical confinement. At high monomer concentrations, crossover to a different scaling regime is observed, consistent with the screening of the excluded-volume interactions. We demonstrate how our findings lead to a revised prediction for the escape time of a polymer from a spherical confinement.