Critical behavior of lattice polymers studied by Monte Carlo simulations

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Abstract
A newly developed expanded grand-canonical formalism is applied to locate the critical point of systems of long polymeric molecules. Two polymer systems are investigated in this work; the first consists of chains in a simple cubic lattice, the second consists of bond-fluctuating molecules. For the former we simulate molecules of up to 16 000 sites, and for the latter we study molecules of up to 500 sites. These chain lengths are well above those investigated by all prior simulation studies of critical phenomena in polymer solutions. Critical parameters are determined as a function of chain length by means of field-mixing finite-size scaling techniques. Our results for the scaling behavior of the critical temperature are consistent with literature values. Our results for the scaling of the critical density, however, indicate that the corresponding critical exponent is higher than that reported by previous authors. The leading logarithmic term of the finite-chain-length correction to the critical density is confirmed by our results.