Stu Whittington

Self-avoiding walks interacting with a surface and subject to a force

Self-avoiding walks can be decorated in various ways to include their interaction with a surface and their response to a force. They are then a useful model of how long linear polymers behave when they adsorb at a surface and are pulled off the surface by a force, applied for instance by an atomic force microscope. This talk will outline what is known rigorously about this model and about related models of branched polymers.