Two novel connectivity-altering atomistic Monte Carlo moves are presented for the fast equilibration of condensed phases of long-chain systems with a variety of chain architectures. With the new moves, isotropic or oriented melts of linear or long-chain branched polymers, dense brushes of terminally grafted macromolecules, and cyclic peptides can be simulated. Results concerning the structural, conformational, and volumetric properties of linear, monodisperse polyethylene melts, simulated with a new united-atom molecular model, are in excellent agreement with experimental data.

We review the methodology, algorithmic implementation and performance characteristics of a hierarchical modeling scheme for the generation, equilibration and topological analysis of polymer systems at various levels of molecular description: from atomistic polyethylene samples to random packings of freely-jointed chains of tangent hard spheres of uniform size. Our analysis focuses on hitherto less discussed algorithmic details of the implementation of both, the Monte Carlo (MC) procedure for the system generation and equilibration, and a postprocessing step, where we identify the underlying topological structure of the simulated systems in the form of primitive paths. In order to demonstrate our arguments, we study how molecular length and packing density (volume fraction) affect the performance of the MC scheme built around chain-connectivity altering moves. In parallel, we quantify the effect of finite system size, of polydispersity, and of the definition of the number of entanglements (and related entanglement molecular weight) on the results about the primitive path network. Along these lines we approve main concepts which had been previously proposed in the literature.

This work is concerned with the atomistic simulation of the volumetric, conformational and structural properties of monodisperse polyethylene (PE) melts of molecular length ranging from C78 up to C1000. In the past, polydisperse models of these melts have been simulated in atomistic detail with the end-bridging Monte Carlo algorithm [Pant and Theodorou, Macromolecules 28, 7224 (1995); Mavrantzas et al., Macromolecules 32, 5072 (1999)]. In the present work, strictly monodisperse as well as polydisperse PE melts are simulated using the recently introduced double bridging and intramolecular double rebridging chain connectivity-altering Monte Carlo moves [Karayiannis et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 105503 (2002)]. These algorithms constitute generalizations of the EB move, since they entail the construction of two trimer bridges between two properly chosen pairs of dimers along the backbones of two different chains or along the same chain. In the simulations, a new molecular model is employed which is a hybrid of the united-atom TraPPE model [Martin and Siepmann, J. Phys. Chem. B 102, 2569 (1998)] and the anisotropic united-atom model [Toxvaerd, J. Chem. Phys. 107, 5197 (1997)]. Results are first presented documenting the efficiency of the algorithm in equilibrating long-chain PE melts and its dependence on chain length and polydispersity. Simulation data concerning the volumetric, conformational and structural properties of the monodisperse PE melts, obtained with the new simulation algorithm, are found to be in excellent agreement with available experimental data.