Coarse Grained Simulations of Neutral and Charged Dendrimers

摘要

Dendrimers are macromolecules with a regular-treelike, branched architecture of their skeleton. In terms of the branching number and the number of terminal groups they represent an extreme case among branched polymers. Dendrimers can occur in neutral and various charged states. Due to their highly branched architecture excluded volume effects are of great importance and conformational properties and monomer distribution profiles of dendrimers differ considerably from those of linear polymers. We give an overview of the state—of—the—art knowledge of physical properties of dendrimers as seen from coarsegrained computer simulations. Our main focus is on isolated dendrimers with flexible spacers both in the neutral and in the charged state, as well as complexation of dendrimers with oppositely charged linear polyelec-trolytes. We briefly address problems of adsorption and concentration effects in dendrimer solutions and outline recent progress and open questions in this field.