Estudo por simulação de uma cadeia polimérica

Abstract

Polymers are present in our daily lifes as plastics, prosthetics and as well as in a swelling number of commodities. In living organisms they execute essential functions, and proteins represent the most abundant organic molecules of the human body. Therefore, understanding the physical properties of a polymeric molecule along with the mechanisms of interaction of a such polymeric chain with other substances is of great importance, constituting a topic of fundamental scientic interest. Understanding the interaction mechanisms between a polymeric chain and solvent molecules can advance medicine, mainly, specially applied to gene therapies. These molecules, we denote as ligands, form complexs with the polymeric molecules, which in cases of biopolymers may have useful biological applications. The objective of this work is the study of a polymeric chain pinned at both ends and surrounded by ligands. We want to understand how ligands aect the mechanical properties of the polymer. The property we focused on is the correlation among two segments of the polymer, which provides usefull information about the behavior of the chain. In particular, the correlation function can be associated to the so called persistence length. We used the Monte Carlo method to obtain the correlations for the chain at various temperatures and dierent ligand concentrations.