N-body interactions in soft-sphere coarse-grained models of star polymers

Abstract

We consider the coarse-grained approach in which star polymers are mapped onto atoms located at the centers of the stars interacting by means of ultrasoft potentials. We generalize the Witten-Pincus formula to all n-body potentials: in the good-solvent regime all potentials show an ultrasoft logarithmic divergence when the relative distance of all n stars goes to zero, with coefficients that can be related to the partition-function exponents γ(f).