Linear chain surfactants at a planar interface: a comparative Monte Carlo study of several lattice models

Linear chain surfactants in a densely packed arrangement (such as alkane chains in lipid monolayers in the “uniform tilt” structures) are described by a crude coarse-grained model where the endgroups grafted on the interface form a regular lattice and the chains are described by the bond fluctuation model with chains containing N = 4 effective monomers only. Square-well interactions between the monomers are studied for both the attractive and repulsive case for three choices of the interaction range. None of these models exhibits a structure with uniform tilt. For attractive interactions the last bond has a strong tendency to fold back thus leading to a very high density close to the interf…