Critical Behaviour of Magnetic Polymers in Two and Three Dimensions

Damien Paul Foster, Debjyoti Majumdar

Published 2021-05-27Version 1

We explore the critical behaviour of two and three dimensional lattice models of polymers in dilute solution where the monomers carry a magnetic moment which interacts ferromagnetically with near-neighbour monomers. Specifically, the model explored consists of a self-avoiding walk on a square or cubic lattice with Ising spins on the visited sites. In three dimensions we confirm and extend previous numerical work, showing clearly the first-order character of both the magnetic transition and polymer collapse, which happen together. We present results for the first time in two dimensions, where the transition is seen to be continuous. Finite-size scaling is used to extract estimates for the critical exponents and transition temperature in the absence of an external magnetic field.