MONTE-CARLO SIMULATION IN POLYMER PHYSICS - SOME RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

The computer simulation of macromolecular materials has to deal with phenomena on length scales from 1 angstrom to 100 angstrom, as well as with time scales ranging over many orders of magnitude, and thus still presents a challenge. With suitably coarse-grained models which disregard detailed information on chemical structure nevertheless collective phenomena can be described, such as unmixing of polymer blends, mesophase ordering of block-copolymer melts, "blob formation" in semidilute solutions, etc. Simulations of such models provide a sensitive test of approximate theories and give valuable hints for experiments.