Comb polymers in dilute solutions: Analytical approach, computer simulations, and experiments

We analyze the universal conformational properties of comblike polymer topologies in the dilute-solution regime. To this end, we evaluate the effective radii of gyration of polymer structures across a range of parameters, including the number of branching points n, the functionality f (the number of grafted side chains in addition to the backbone), and the relative polymerization degree a, defined as the ratio between the degrees of polymerization of the backbone spacer and the grafted side chains. We combine an analytical approach based on the continuous-chain model and direct polymer renormalization with coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations and comparison with available experimental data. In particular, we quantitatively estimate the increase in the effective size of comb structures with increasing relative polymerization degree a. Our analytical results show good qualitative agreement with both the simulations and the available experimental data for monodisperse homopolymer combs.