Monolayer Organization Modeling Using Molecular Dynamics

Many experiments have highlighted the existence of an unexpected long-range attractive force between two hydrophilic or hydrophobic monolayers, immersed in water or in nonaqueous solvents. The origin of this attraction has not been discovered yet. A mechanism responsible for these forces may be an interaction between ordered domains of the two close monolayers. The occurrence and characteristics of such domains are related to the nature of their constituting molecules and also their structural organization. We present here a molecular analysis, via molecular dynamics simulations, of ordered domains within a monolayer. We investigate the dependence between the characteristics of the domains and both the length of the molecules and the layer density.