Monte Carlo Simulation of Long Hard-Sphere Polymer Chains in Two to Five Dimensions

Abstract

We perform simulations for long hard-sphere polymer chains using a recently developed binary-tree based Monte Carlo method. Systems in two to five dimensions with free and periodic boundary conditions and up to $10^7$ repeat units are considered. We focus on the scaling properties of the end-to-end distance and on the entropy and their dependence on the sphere diameter. To this end new methods for measuring entropy and its derivatives are introduced. By determining the Flory exponent $\nu$ and the weakly universal amplitude ratio of end-to-end distance to radius of gyration we find that the system generally reproduces the behavior of self-avoiding lattice walks in strong support of universality.