Charged polymeric brushes: structure and scaling relations.

We present numerical results from a self-consistent (mean)-field (SCF) model for the structure and scaling behavior of charged brushes and compare these with predictions of an analytical SCF model on the same system. The parameters we consider in this study are the chain length N, the average surface area σ per anchored chain, the average distance m between neighboring charges on the chains, and the salt concentration O s . At high anchoring densities, three different regimes of brush behavior may be distinguished. In the salt-free case, the behavior of the brush is dominated either by electrostatic interactions at high charge densities (osmotic brush) or by nonelectrostatic excluded-volume interactions at low charge densities (quasi-neutral brush)