Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Polymers appear in many different forms, namely as soft or hard solids, as liquids, glues, or melts, or as networks of covalently bonded monomers, or adsorbed onto a surface, or twisted and entangled in knotted conformations. Underlying this rich set of forms and thermodynamic phases is the notion of polymer entropy, which is related to the number of conformations of a polymer molecule. In this application I shall give an overview of my ongoing work in this field and explain several avenues for continuing my research program. I will also explain the current involvement of students in my research program and their contributions, as well as future projects which are suitable for training students in Monte Carlo simulations and statistical mechanics. Polymer entropy was studied by Nobel prize winners Flory in the 1940s, and de Gennes in the 1970s. A rich mathematical theory to model the entropy of string-like objects was built on their work. This includes the self-avoiding walk and related models, directed path models in combinatorial mathematics, percolation, networks, as well as numerical methods including Monte Carlo methods. These models are ubiquitous in the statistical mechanics of random clusters and in the theory of phase transitions and are related to classical models of spin system models of magnetic materials. This area of research straddles rigorous and applied statistical mechanics, combinatorial mathematics, probability theory, and mathematical physics. There is also a connection to experimental and theoretical polymer physics and chemistry. Research in this area is important because it adds to the understanding of phase behaviour and scaling in models of interacting and dense polymers and on networks. Over the last cycle my students and I have worked on mean field scaling for networks in molecular biology and on a self-avoiding walk model of compressed dense polymers. With other collaborators I have worked on the phase diagrams of linear and branched polymers and on partition function zeros of adsorbing self-avoiding walks. My short term goals are to expand my research into the partition function zeros of models of self-avoiding walks and directed lattice paths, to apply Flory-Huggins theory (a theory of dense polymer solutions) to models of copolymer melts, and to perform simulations of lattice spin systems using the GARM algorithm. In addition, I am investigating the phase diagram of pulled adsorbing models of branched polymers using self-avoiding walk models. Studies on partition function zeros and models of dense polymers will be done with graduate students. The longer term goals are to consider the usefulness of Flory-Huggins theory in creating a framing for understanding the phase diagram of dense polymer systems on the one hand, and on the other hand to examine the mathematical properties of partition function zeros and the role they play in creating critical points in self-avoiding walk models of interacting polymers.