| Abstract
| - Adsorption of charged polymers (polyelectrolytes) from asemidilute solution to a chargedsurface is investigated theoretically. We obtain simple scalinglaws for (i) the amount of polymer Γadsorbed to the surface and (ii) the width D of the adsorbedlayer, as a function of the fractional chargeper monomer p and the salt concentrationcb. For strongly chargedpolyelectrolytes (p ≲ 1) in a low-saltsolution, both Γ and D scale asp-1/2. In high-saltsolutions D ∼/pwhereas the scaling behavior of Γdepends on the strength of the polymer charge. For weakpolyelectrolytes (p ≪ 1) we find thatΓ ∼p/,and for strong polyelectrolytes Γ ∼/p.Our results are in good agreement with adsorptionexperiments and with numerical solutions of mean-fieldequations.
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