Overlap Concentration in Salt-Free Polyelectrolyte Solutions

For strongly charged polyelectrolytes in salt-free solutions, we use molecular dynamics simulations of a coarse-grained bead-spring model to calculate overlap concentrations c* and chain structure for polymers containing N = 10 1600 monomers. Over much this range, find that the end-to-end distance R* at increases faster than linearly with increasing N, as chains concentration approach extended conformations. This trend results decreasing stronger function classical prediction ∼ N–2. dependence can be fit either by logarithmic correction scaling or an apparent N–m, m > 2.