Molecular dynamics simulation of polymer chains with excluded volume

Abstract

Molecular dynamics simulation techniques have been used to study the equilibrium configurational properties of freely moving polymer chains constructed from linked elastic spheres. The mean square end-to-end distance and radius of gyration are found to vary exponentially with chain length, and the results are similar to those obtained in Monte Carlo and self-avoiding walk studies. It is suggested that molecular dynamics is capable of yielding results of the same quality as Monte Carlo, while avoiding the inherent sampling problems.