Anisotropic effective interactions and stack formation in mixtures of semiflexible ring polymers

By means of extensive computer simulations, we investigate the formation of columnar structures (stacks) in concentrated solutions of semiflexible ring polymers. To characterize the stacks we employ an algorithm that identifies tube-like structures in the simulation cell. Stacks are found both in the real system and in the fluid of soft disks interacting through the effective anisotropic pair potential derived for the rings [P. Poier et al., Macromolecules, 2015, 48, 4983-4997]. Furthermore, we investigate binary mixtures of cluster-forming and non-cluster-forming rings. We find that monodispersity is not a requirement for stack formation. The latter is found for a broad range of mixture compositions, though the columns in the mixtures exhibit important differences to those observed in the monodisperse case. We extend the anisotropic effective model to mixtures. We show that it correctly predicts stack formation and constitutes a significant improvement with respect to the usual isotropic effective description based only on macromolecular centers-of-mass.