Self-avoiding walks in a slab: rigorous results

A polymer in the confined spaces between colloid particles loses entropy and exerts a repulsive entropic force on the confining particles. This situation can be modelled by a self-avoiding walk confined in a slab between two parallel planes in the lattice. In this paper, we prove the existence of a limiting free energy for the general case that the walk is interacting with the parallel bounding planes. We also prove that the limiting free energy is strictly increasing with the distance between the bounding planes in some regions of the phase diagram. These results demonstrate the presence of a non-zero repulsive entropic force in the model. Finally, we also examine the relation between the limiting free energy in this model and the limiting free energy in a model of walks adsorbing onto a single plane. We prove that these limiting free energies are equal in some regions of the phase diagram in the limit that the width of the slab between the parallel bounding planes is taken to infinity.