Crystal, Fivefold and Glass Formation in Clusters of Polymers Interacting with the Square Well Potential

Abstract

We present results, from Monte Carlo (MC) simulations, on polymer systems of freely jointed chains with spherical monomers interacting through the square well potential. Starting from athermal packings of chains of tangent hard spheres, we activate the square well potential under constant volume and temperature corresponding effectively to instantaneous quenching. We investigate how the intensity and range of pair-wise interactions affected the final morphologies by fixing polymer characteristics such as average chain length and tolerance in bond gaps. Due to attraction chains are brought closer together and they form clusters with distinct morphologies. A wide variety of structures is obtained as the model parameters are systematically varied: weak interactions lead to purely amorphous clusters followed by well-ordered ones. The latter include the whole spectrum of crystal morphologies: from virtually perfect hexagonal close packed (HCP) and face centered cubic (FCC) crystals, to random hexagonal close packed layers of single stacking direction of alternating HCP and FCC layers, to structures of mixed HCP/FCC character with multiple stacking directions and defects in the form of twins. Once critical values of interaction are met, fivefold-rich glassy clusters are formed. We discuss the similarities and differences between energy-driven crystal nucleation in thermal polymer systems as opposed to entropy-driven phase transition in athermal polymer packings. We further calculate the local density of each site, its dependence on the distance from the center of the cluster and its correlation with the crystallographic characteristics of the local environment. The short- and long-range conformations of chains are analyzed as a function of the established cluster morphologies.