Transitions of a tethered chain under tension

An applied tension changes the equilibrium conformations of a tethered polymer chain and thus affects both the adsorption transition and the coil globule transition. Conversely, solvent quality and surface attraction are reflected in equilibrium force-extension curves that can be measured in experiments. In this work, we performed Monte Carlo simulations of the bond-fluctuation model with a Wang-Landau algorithm to determine the density of states in the state space of monomer-monomer contacts, monomer-surface contacts, and chain extension. We study the effect of tension on the collapse and adsorption transitions and calculate force- extension curves that may be compared with experimental data.