Adsorption characteristics of amphiphilic dendrimers

Abstract

With the aid of Monte Carlo simulations we investigate the equilibrium behavior of amphiphilic dendrimers, isolated as well as in the vicinity of uncharged planar walls, whereby the core- and shell-monomers constituting the dendrimer interact differently among themselves and with the wall surface. Contrary to the dense-core-forming athermal dendrimers, amphiphilic dendrimers can exhibit the so-called dense-shell structure. In addition, the effective interaction between two of these dendrimers has negative Fourier components, which allows them to form clusters of penetrating dendrimers; this is made possible by the open structure of dendrimers. The roughly spherical symmetric conformation of dendrimers in the bulk is distorted by the presence of a nearby wall for which, depending on the type of wall interaction, two different types of conformations can be distinguished. Finally, the effective dendrimer–dendrimer and dendrimer–wall interactions are employed to compare the results of monomer-resolved simulations with those stemming from a coarse grained level description.