Can Polymer Coils be modeled as "Soft Colloids"?
  We map dilute or semi-dilute solutions of non-intersecting polymer chains onto a fluid of ``soft'' particles interacting via a concentration dependent effective pair potential, by inverting the pair distribution function of the centers of mass of the initial polymer chains. A similar inversion is used to derive an effective wall-polymer potential; these potentials are combined to successfully reproduce the calculated exact depletion interaction induced by non-intersecting polymers between two walls. The mapping opens up the possibility of large-scale simulations of polymer solutions in complex geometries. 
A.A. Louis (1), P.G. Bolhuis (1), J.P. Hansen (1), and E.J. Meijer (2)   ((1)Chemistry, Cambridge U; (2)Chemical Engineering...