Polymer modeling

The modeling of polymers, the most prominent of soft materials, has reached a level of maturity within the last few years, but new advances are being made in several areas of considerable practical importance. New sampling techniques are being developed to accelerate the exploration of configuration space, which has been and continues to be of paramount importance in the determination of the properties of polymeric materials. Simultaneous length and time scale problems are being addressed with new coarse-grained methods, while more traditional methods are being applied to problems of increasing chemical complexity and reality. These several advances are yielding unprecedented insights into the relative importance of intramolecular (manifested in long-range polymeric structure) and intermolecular interactions in determining the properties of materials.