Contact-Density Analysis of Lattice Polymer Adsorption Transitions

By means of contact-density chain-growth simulations, we investigate a simple lattice model of a flexible polymer interacting with an attractive substrate. The contact density is a function of the numbers of monomer–substrate and monomer–monomer contacts. These contact numbers represent natural order parameters and allow for a comprising statistical study of the conformational space accessible to the polymer in dependence of external parameters such as the attraction strength of the substrate and the temperature. Since the contact density is independent of the energy scales associated to the interactions, its logarithm is an unbiased measure for the entropy of the conformational space. By setting explicit energy scales, the thus defined, highly general microcontact entropy can easily be related to the microcanonical entropy of the corresponding hybrid polymer–substrate system.