Despite the modern advances in the available computational resources, the length and time scales of the physical systems that can be studied in full atomic detail, via molecular simulations, are still limited. To overcome such limitations, coarse-grained (CG) models have been developed to reduce the dimensionality of the physical system under study. However, to study such systems at the atomic level, it is necessary to re-introduce the atomistic details into the CG description.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBottom-up coarse-graining of polymers is commonly performed by matching structural order parameters such as distribution of bond lengths, bending and dihedral angles, and pair distribution functions. In this study, we introduce the distribution of nearest-neighbors as an additional order parameter in the concept of local density potentials. We describe how the inverse-Monte Carlo method provides a framework for forcefield development that is capable of overcoming challenges associated with the parameterization of interaction terms in polymer systems.
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