Self-avoiding walks pulled at an angle from a surface

Abstract

We investigate polymers pulled away from an interacting surface, where the force is applied to the untethered endpoint and at an angle θ to the surface. We use the canonical self-avoiding walk model of polymers and obtain the phase diagram of the model using Monte Carlo simulations for a range of angles, temperatures and force magnitudes. The phase diagram of the model displays re-entrance at low temperatures for three-dimensional walks when the pulling is more vertical than horizontal. Our results agree with various exactly solvable lattice models that have been previously studied.