Anisotropic van der Waals dispersion forces in polymers: Structural symmetry breaking leads to enhanced conformational search

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Both structure and dynamics of (bio)polymers are profoundly affected by van der Waals interactions. Many-body van der Waals forces are shown to depend on the global conformation of polymers, in contrast with the limited distance range of widely used pairwise van der Waals models. This is shown to produce an increased smoothness of the potential energy surface and qualitatively different steady-state geometries.