Polymer-Boundary Surface Interactions and Bilayer Curvature Elasticity

The free-energy contribution of a polymer interacting with a bounding surface of a general shape is obtained exactly through a multiple-scattering expansion. Two extreme cases of the polymer interacting with a surface are considered, viz. an ideal polymeric chain sterically excluded from the vicinity of the surface and an ideal polymeric chain adsorbed to the surface. In both cases the thermodynamic properties of the system are obtained in the form of a convergent expansion in powers of the local principal radii of curvature of the bounding surface.