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Updated: Nov 14, 2025

Synthesis of Cyclic Polymers and Characterization of Their Diffusive Motion in the Melt State at the Single Molecule Level
Published on: September 26, 2016
Dynamic coarse-graining of polymer systems using mobility functions
Bing Li1, Kostas Daoulas2, Friederike Schmid1
1Institut für Physik, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, 55099 Mainz, Germany.
Abstract:
We propose a dynamic coarse-graining (CG) scheme for mapping heterogeneous polymer fluids onto extremely CG models in a dynamically consistent manner. The idea is to use as target function for the mapping a wave-vector dependent mobility function derived from the single-chain dynamic structure factor, which is calculated in the microscopic reference system. In previous work, we have shown that dynamic density functional calculations based on this mobility function can accurately reproduce the order/disorder kinetics in polymer melts, thus it is a suitable starting point for dynamic mapping. To enable the mapping over a range of relevant wave vectors, we propose to modify the CG dynamics by introducing internal friction parameters that slow down the CG monomer dynamics on local scales, without affecting the static equilibrium structure of the system. We illustrate and discuss the method using the example of infinitely long linear Rouse polymers mapped onto ultrashort CG chains. We show that our method can be used to construct dynamically consistent CG models for homopolymers with CG chain lengthN= 4, whereas for copolymers, longer CG chain lengths are necessary.
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