Star Polymers

Scaling and Effective Interactions of Star Polymers

The fundamental physics, universal scaling laws, and soft-core interactions of star polymers are investigated. By employing highly optimized implementations of the Pruned-Enriched Rosenbluth Method (PERM) that allow the multiple arms of star polymers to grow simultaneously, this work maps out structural profiles and free energy distributions across a broad range of crowding and complexity.

Universal Scaling of Multi-Arm Star Topologies: Analyzing large-scale simulations of three-dimensional star polymers with up to 80 arms to precisely calculate critical exponents for the partition function and star size, testing scaling theories under varying arm densities.

"Scaling of Star Polymers with one to 80 Arms", Macromolecules 37. 4658 (2004).

Effective Pair Potentials and Interpenetration: Modeling the soft-core repulsive forces between pairs of crowded star polymers to demonstrate how arm crowding shifts their effective interactions away from typical ultra-soft approximations toward Gaussian behavior.

"Effective Interactions between Star Polymers", Europhysics Lett. 66, 874 (2004).