Conducting transition analysis of thin films composed of long flexible macromolecules: Percolation study

By simulating percolation and critical phenomena of labelled species inside films composed of single-component linear homogeneous macromolecules using the molecular Monte Carlo method in 3 dimensions, we study the dependence of these conducting transition and critical phenomena upon both thermal movements, i.e. spontaneous mobility, and extra-molecular topological constraints of the molecules. Systems containing topological constraints and/or composed of immobile particles, e.g. lattice models and chemical gelation, were studied in conventional works on percolation. Coordinates of the randomly distributed particles in the conventional lattice models are limited to discrete lattice points. Moreover, each particle is spatially fixed at the distributed position, which results in a temporally unchanged network structure. Although each polymer in the chemical gels can spontaneously move in the continuous space, the network structure is fixed when cross-linking reaction ends. By contrast to these conventional systems, all the molecules in the present system freely move and spontaneously diffuse in the continuous space. The network structure of the present molecules continues changing dynamically. The percolation and critical phenomena of such dynamic network structures are examined here. We reveal that these phenomena also occur in the present system, and that both the universality class and percolation threshold are independent of the extra-molecular topological constraints. Graphical abstract:

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