The Influence of Temperature on the Percolation Threshold in Two-Dimensional Polymer Systems

The structure of a two-dimensional film formed by strongly adsorbed polymer chains was studied by means of Monte Carlo simulations.We investigated the percolation in systems consisting of flexible polymer chains. A coarse-grained polymer chains representation was assumed and polymer chains were represented by linear sequences of lattice beads. The positions of these beads were restricted to vertices of a two-dimensional square lattice. Properties of the model system were determined by means of Monte Carlo simulations with a refined Verdier-Stockmayer sampling algorithm. Percolation thresholds macromolecules were determined. The methodology concerning the determination of the percolation thresholds for an infinite chain system was discussed. The influence of the chain length and the temperature on the percolation was discussed. It was shown that the introduction of long-range interactions changes the behavior of the percolation threshold dramatically. The percolation threshold initially decreases with the chain length while for longer ones it is stable .