Abnormal polymer transport in crowded attractive micropost arrays

Abstract

We investigate polymer diffusion in a quasi-two-dimensional environment decorated with attractive cylindrical posts using Langevin dynamics simulation. We find that the polymer diffusivity has non-monotonic dependence on the post array density. This diffusive behavior strongly depends on the adsorption–desorption transition and the critical adsorption strength ε_c. For ε < ε_c, the polymer undergoes normal diffusion and the diffusivity decreases as the post density increases due to the reduction of the void volume. For ε > ε_c, polymer dynamics is strongly mediated by post adsorption, and we observe a regime where the polymer diffusivity increases as the post density increases. The polymer diffusivity reaches a maximum, which can be attributed to cross-post translation enabled by large polymer conformation fluctuations. We find both cross-post transport and polymer conformation fluctuations strongly depend on the post absorption strength and the chain length.