2013/01/31 by Roberto Menichetti, Andrea Pelissetto
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics #Condensed matter physics #Material Dynamics and Properties #Materials science #Molecular dynamics #Phase Equilibria and Thermodynamics #Phenomenological model #Physics #Polymer #Quantum mechanics #Star (game theory) #Star polymer #Statistical physics #Theoretical and Computational Physics #Thermodynamics #Verlet integration #Work (physics) #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.1063/1.4796143
9 pages. In the new version, comments added and a few typos corrected. To appear in J. Chem. Phys
arxiv created 2013/03/07 · openalex publication_date 2013/03/25 · arxiv updated 2015/06/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We compare different coarse-grained single-blob models for star polymers. We find that phenomenological models inspired by the Daoud-Cotton theory reproduce quite poorly the thermodynamics of these systems, even if the potential is assumed to be density dependent, as done in the analysis of experimental results. Using the numerically determined coarse-grained potential, we also determine the minimum value f(c) of the functionality of the star polymer for which a fluid-solid transition occurs. By applying the Hansen-Verlet criterion we find 35 < f(c) ≲ 40. This result is confirmed by an analysis that uses the modified (reference) hypernetted chain method and is qualitatively consistent with previous work.