Scaling Laws of Bottle-Brush Polymers in Dilute Solutions

The structural determination and manipulation of bottle-brush polymers, a class of polymers with serially grafted side-chains, is challenging due to the interplay of side-chain and backbone interactions over various length scales. The present work performs a detailed analysis, using molecular dynamics simulation techniques, to unravel these interactions by probing the distinct rod to a flexible real-chain with self-avoiding walk (SAW) type crossover in the backbone static structure factor. This analysis elucidates the deviation from flexible chain behavior, while also providing a quantitative measure of persistence length, l(P). Significantly, the results identify a trend in l(P) which is consistent with the debated theoretical prediction of l(P) similar to N-s(15/8), where N-s is the number of monomers in each side-chain of the bottle-brush polymer.