Solvent Effects on the Shape of a Tetramer

Abstract

The solvent effect on the shape of a tetramer with increasing temperature is analyzed. For this purpose models of an isolated chain and a chain immersed in a solvent have been simulated by Molecular Dynamics. A solvent model represented by stochastic forces has been tested against molecular dynamics results. The behaviour of the mean-square end-to-end distance 〈R ²〉 and 〈l ₁ ³ S ²〉 with increasing temperature are shown. where l ₁ is the longest eigenvalue of the moment of inertia tensor and S is the radius of gyration. All the chain models studied show different behaviour of these quantities at low temperature compared to high temperature where the shape of the tetramer is temperature insensitive. The main solvent effect is to pospone the transition to higher temperature. The stochastic solvent model qualitatively agrees with molecular dynamics results.

Key Words:

• Solvent effect
• tetramer
• shape