Polymer chain dynamics derived from the Kramers potential: A treatment of the Rouse model with and without excluded volume interaction

Abstract

We suggest that at least for single polymer chains relaxation times of typical dynamical processes can be obtained from biased sampling Monte Carlo computations on equilibrium data. We show this explicitly for the viscosity difference relaxation time τ in the Rouse or Zimm model (with any suitable, iterated or not, preaveraging of the Oseen–Burgers tensor) chain. We briefly discuss the corrections of such theory due to the excluded volume effect. We illustrate by performing the biased average of the equilibrium radius of gyration of Rouse chains of up to 150 monomer beads on a cubic lattice which yields directly τ.