Simulating stochastic adsorption of diluted solute molecules at interfaces

This report uses Monte Carlo simulations to connect stochastic single-molecule and ensemble surface adsorption of molecules from dilute solutions. Monte Carlo simulations often use a fundamental time resolution to simulate each discrete step for each molecule. The adsorption rate obtained from such a simulation surprisingly contains an error compared to the results obtained from the traditional method. Simulating adsorption kinetics is interesting in many processes, such as mass transportation within cells, the kinetics of drug–receptor interactions, membrane filtration, and other general reaction kinetics in diluted solutions. Thus, it is important to understand the origin of the disagreement and find a way to correct the results. This report reviews the traditional model, explains the single-molecule simulations, and introduces a method to correct the results of adsorption rate. For example, one can bin finer time steps into time steps of interest to simulate the fractal diffusion or simply introduce a correction factor for the simulations. Then two model systems, self-assembled monolayer (SAM) and biosensing on the patterned surface, are simulated to check the accuracy of the equations. It is found that the adsorption rate of SAM is highly dependent on the conditions and the uncertainty is large. However, the biosensing system is relatively accurate. This is because the concentration gradient near the interface varies significantly with reaction conditions for SAMs while relatively stable for the biosensing system.