RANDOM SEQUENTIAL ADSORPTION OF LINES AND ELLIPSES

Infinitely many lines of zero thickness may be adsorbed onto a plane without overlap, and it is shown that the number of lines adsorbed should scale as 13/, where is the number of adsorption trials per unit area of surface. This is confirmed by numerical simulation. The adsorption of ellipses with major and minor axes 2a, 2b respectively, is also studied. The area coverage theta approaches its maximum value theta max as -alpha as to infinity , where alpha is typically 1/3. As b/a decreases from unity, theta max first increases to a maximum value 0.58 +or- 0.01 when b approximately=0.5, and then decreases, a feature not noted in previous work.