Accurate effective pair potentials for polymer solutions

Solutions of semiflexible polymers confined by repulsive planar walls are studied by density functional theory and Molecular Dynamics simulations, to clarify the competition between the chain alignment favored by the wall and the depletion caused by the monomer-wall repulsion. A coarse-grained bead-spring model with bond bending potential is studied, varying both the contour length and the persistence length of the polymers, as well as the monomer concentration in the solutio...

It is generally assumed that hydrodynamics in dense polyelectrolyte (PE) solutions, such as semidilute PE solutions and PE complex coacervates, is heavily screened and inconsequential. Here, using mesoscale molecular dynamics that explicitly accounts for hydrodynamics, we show that segmental dynamics in the subdiffusive regime show strong signatures of hydrodynamic interactions that persist well beyond the correlation length of semidilute PE solutions with moderately short ch...

Single three dimensional polymers confined to a slab, i.e. to the region between two parallel plane walls, are studied by Monte Carlo simulations. They are described by $N$-step walks on a simple cubic lattice confined to the region $1 \le z \le D$. The simulations cover both regions $D << R_F$ and $D >> R_F$ (where $R_F \sim N^\nu$ is the Flory radius, with $\nu \approx 0.587$), as well as the cross-over region in between. Chain lengths are up to $N=80,000$, slab widths up t...

We use thermodynamic perturbation theory to calculate the free energies and resulting phase diagrams of binary systems of spherical colloidal particles and interacting polymer coils in good solvent within an effective one-component representation of such mixtures, whereby the colloidal particles interact via a polymer-induced depletion potential. MC simulations are used to test the convergence of the high temperature expansion of the free energy. The phase diagrams calculated...

This contribution briefly reviews some recent work demonstrating the partial breakdown of the colloidal fluid <--> atomic fluid analogy. The success of liquid state theory for atomic fluids stems in part from the van der Waals picture, where steric interactions dominate the structure, and attractive interactions can be added as a perturbation. For complex fluids described by effective potentials, this picture may break down. In the first example discussed, depletion potential...

The osmotic pressure $P$ in equilibrium polymers (EP) in good solvent is investigated by means of a three dimensional off-lattice Monte Carlo simulation. Our results compare well with real space renormalisation group theory and the osmotic compressibility $K \propto \phi \upd \phi/\upd P$ from recent light scattering study of systems of long worm-like micelles. We confirm the scaling predictions for EP based on traditional physics of quenched monodisperse polymers in the dilu...

The effect of solvent quality on dilute and semi-dilute regimes of polymers in solution is studied by means of Monte Carlo simulations. The equation of state, adsorptions near a hard wall, wall-polymer surface tension and effective depletion potentials are all calculated as a function of concentration and solvent quality. We find important differences between polymers in good and theta solvents. In the dilute regime, the physical properties for polymers in a theta solvent clo...

We present a computer simulation of entangled polymer solutions at equilibrium. The chains repel each other via a soft Gaussian potential, appropriate for semi-dilute solutions at the scale of a correlation blob. The key innovation to suppress chain crossings is to use a pseudo-continuous model of a backbone which effectively leaves no gaps between consecutive points on the chain, unlike the usual bead-and-spring model. Our algorithm is sufficiently fast to observe the entang...

In a previous article [E.M. Blokhuis, K.I. Skau, and J.B. Avalos, J. Chem. Phys. 119, 3483 (2003)], a self-consistent field formalism was derived for weakly adsorbing polymers, valid for any chain length. It was shown that the presence of a solid wall induces an ordering of the polymers on the scale of the radius of gyration far away from the surface (the distal region). These oscillations in the polymer concentration profile were first noted in work by Semenov et al., and la...

This article presents a comprehensive review of the Hydrodynamic Scaling Model for the dynamics of polymers in dilute and nondilute solutions. The Hydrodynamic Scaling Model differs from some other treatments of non-dilute polymer solutions in that it takes polymer dynamics up to high concentrations to be dominated by solvent-mediated hydrodynamic interactions, with chain crossing constraints presumed to create at most secondary corrections. Many other models take the contrar...