Elastic Lennard-Jones polymers meet clusters: differences and similarities.
We investigate solid-solid and solid-liquid transitions of elastic flexible off-lattice polymers with Lennard-Jones monomer-monomer interaction and anharmonic springs by means of sophisticated variants of multicanonical Monte Carlo methods. We find that the low-temperature behavior depends strongly and nonmonotonically on the system size and exhibits broad similarities to unbound atomic clusters. Particular emphasis is dedicated to the classification of icosahedral and nonicosahedral low-energy polymer morphologies.
Institut für Theoretische Physik and Centre for Theoretical Sciences (NTZ), Universität Leipzig, Postfach 100920, D-04009 Leipzig, Germany. stefan.schnabel@itp.uni-leipzig.de
Stefan
S
Schnabel
Michael
M
Bachmann
Wolfhard
W
Janke