Theory of Polymer Adsorption Onto Selected Chemically Patterned Substrates.

We theoretically studied the reversible adsorption of polymers onto selected rigid and soft chemically non-uniform substrates with an emphasis on the polymer adsorption onto the selective binary mixed brushes. In the course of our study, we developed two independent theoretical methods, the self-consistent perturbation expansion and the transfer operator formalism, which made it possible to thoroughly investigate the density structure of polymers adsorbed onto chemically non-uniform substrates. As successive stages of our research, we applied the above theoretical methods to the study of the polymer adsorption onto the selected substrates, as follows: (i) periodically patterned rigid surface; (ii) randomly patterned rigid surface; (iii) surface that bears an array of periodically distributed adsorption centers; (iv) ripple, random and dimple morphologies of the binary mixed brush. By comparing the results obtained for the above listed systems we derived the qualitative trends that are common for the polymer adsorption onto the investigated chemically non-uniform substrates. In this talk, we discuss what are the main factors that influence the polymer adsorption onto the patterned substrates and how to reduce/enhance the polymer adsorption by way of manipulating these competitive factors.