Center for Functional Nanomaterials Seminar

Charged polymers are ubiquitous in a nature and used in a number of technologies. However, our understanding of these systems is far from complete due to interplay of a large number of variables such as temperature, salt content, solvent quality, chain length etc. Modeling of charged polymers provides useful insights into the behavior of these molecules. However, the modeling requires large computational resources due to the presence of long-range electrostatic interactions. This, in turn, limits the applicability of traditional methods such as Monte-Carlo to very small systems. However, field-theoretic methods circumvent this problem by dealing with the fields created by particles rather than particles directly. An advantage of the field-theoretic methods over the conventional particle based methods is the faster convergence to the equilibrium states for longer and high density polymeric systems. This makes the field-theoretic methods a complimentary tool to the traditional particle based methods. We have used the field-theoretic methods to study charged polymers in relevance to coacervation in the mixtures of oppositely charged polymers, conformational characteristics of polyzwitterions, translocation of charged polymers, self-assembly of spherical virus particles etc. Results regarding the effects of electrostatic interaction strength, salt content, chain length and other experimental variables on the behavior of charged polymeric systems will be presented.