Microscopic and coarse-grained correlation functions of concentrated dendrimer solutions

We employ monomer resolved computer simulations of model dendrimer molecules to examine the significance of many-body effects in concentrated solutions of the same. In particular, we measure the radial distribution functions and the scattering functions between the centres of mass of the dissolved dendrimers at various concentrations, reaching values that slightly exceed the overlap density of the macromolecules. We analyse the role played by many-body effective interactions by comparing the structural data to those obtained by applying exclusively the previously obtained two-body effective interactions between the dendrimers (Götze et al 2004 J. Chem. Phys. 120 7761). We find that the effects of the many-body forces are small in general and they become weaker as the dendrimer flexibility increases. Moreover, we test the validity of the oft-used factorization approximation to the total scattering intensity into a product of the form factors and the scattering factors, finding a breakdown of this factorization at high concentrations.