2004/12/20 by I. O. Götze, Ingo O. Götze, Götze, I. O. +3
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Environmental Science · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Dendrimers and Hyperbranched Polymers #FOS: Physical sciences #Microplastics and Plastic Pollution #Protein Structure and Dynamics #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft) #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.cond-mat/0412535
Submitted to Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter
arxiv created 2004/12/20 · openalex publication_date 2004/12/20 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We employ monomer-resolved computer simulations of model dendrimer molecules, to examine the significance of many-body effects in concentrated solutions of the same. In particular, we measure the radial distribution functions and the scattering functions between the centres of mass of the dissolved dendrimers at various concentrations, reaching values that slightly exceed the overlap density of the macromolecules. We analyse the role played by many-body effective interactions by comparing the structural data to those obtained by applying exclusively the previously obtained two-body effective interactions between the dendrimers [Götze I O, Harreis H M and Likos C N 2004 \it J. Chem. Phys. \bf 120 7761]. We find that the effects of the many-body forces are small in general and they become weaker as the dendrimer flexibility increases. Moreover, we test the validity of the oft-used factorisation approximation to the total scattering intensity into a product of the form- and the scattering factors, finding a breakdown of this factorisation at high concentrations.