ABSTRACT
There are many reasons for applying coarse-graining schemes to polymer simulations. The overall structure of a chemically speci c polymeric system should be reproduced without resorting to the computationally expensive local atomistic detail. We typically also want to improve the speed and memory requirements of simulations, which would enable us to perform simulations of more and longer chains. Especially, simulations of long chain systems are necessary as there are qualitative differences in the behavior of short and long chains [14]. For long chains the relaxation rates increase faster than cubically with the degree of polymerization [15], making it extremely challenging to perform meaningful; that is, equilibrated, detailed atomistic simulations. Even if it were unproblematic to perform such huge simulations, their actual usefulness would be questionable as the amount of data they are producing would be very dif cult to analyze.
