The Interacting Growth Walk (IGW) is a kinect growing model that could be especially useful to investigate polymer systems at low temperature regimes. It may generate self-avoiding chains to be used in investigation of physical and geometrial properties of polymer chains at different temperatures. In this work we introduce stiffness effects in the standard Narasimhan IGW model aiming to investigate a single strand semiflexible polymer by adding an energy penalty (χ) for each change in the growth direction of the chain. We found that, depending on stiffness strength, the chain can be considered flexible (for χ = 0) or rigid (in the limit χ → ∞)). For intermediate values of χ the IGW model generates semiflexible chains. The resulting model called as semiflexible interacting growth model was investigated by means of Monte Carlo simulations and the properties of the chains obtained were analyzed. It is observed phase transitions between three different conformational arrangements: an extended phase, a compact isotropic phase and a compact anisotropic phase. Similar final conformations as well as phase transitions are known from self-avoiding walk models.
Interacting Growth models; Θ -Transition; Self-avoiding Walks
