English

Can Polymer Coils be modeled as "Soft Colloids"?

Soft Condensed Matter 2009-10-31 v2 Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

We map dilute or semi-dilute solutions of non-intersecting polymer chains onto a fluid of ``soft'' particles interacting via a concentration dependent effective pair potential, by inverting the pair distribution function of the centers of mass of the initial polymer chains. A similar inversion is used to derive an effective wall-polymer potential; these potentials are combined to successfully reproduce the calculated exact depletion interaction induced by non-intersecting polymers between two walls. The mapping opens up the possibility of large-scale simulations of polymer solutions in complex geometries.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0006199,
  title  = {Can Polymer Coils be modeled as "Soft Colloids"?},
  author = {A. A. Louis and P. G. Bolhuis and J. P. Hansen and E. J. Meijer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0006199},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

4 pages, 3 figures ReVTeX[epsfig,multicol,amssymb] references updated

R2 v1 2026-07-22T10:03:44.176Z