Self-attracting polymers in two dimensions with three low-temperature phases

Abstract

We study via Monte Carlo simulation a generalisation of the so-called vertex interacting self-avoiding walk (VISAW) model on the square lattice. The configurations are actually not self-avoiding walks but rather restricted self-avoiding trails (bond avoiding paths) which may visit a site of the lattice twice provided the path does not cross itself: to distinguish this subset of trails we shall call these configurations \emph{grooves}. Three distinct interactions are added to the configurations: firstly the VISAW interaction, which is associated with doubly visited sites, secondly a nearest neighbour interaction in the same fashion as the canonical interacting self-avoiding walk (ISAW) and thirdly, a stiffness energy to enhance or decrease the probability of bends in the configuration. In addition to the normal high temperature phase we find three low temperature phases: (i) the usual amorphous liquid drop-like "globular" phase, (ii) an anisotropic "$β$-sheet" phase with dominant configurations consisting of aligned long straight segments, which has been found in semi-flexible nearest neighbour ISAW models, and (iii) a maximally dense phase, where the all sites of the path are associated with doubly visited sites (except those of the boundary of the configuration), previously observed in interacting self-avoiding trails. We construct a phase diagram using the fluctuations of the energy parameters and three order parameters. The $β$-sheet and maximally dense phases do not seem to meet in the phase space and are always separated by either the extended or globular phases. We focus attention on the transition between the extended and maximally dense phases, as that is the transition in the original VISAW model. We find that for the path lengths considered there is a range of parameters where the transition is first order and it is otherwise continuous.