Chemically transferable coarse-grained potentials from conditional reversible work calculations

The representability and transferability of effective pair potentials used in multiscale simulations of soft matter systems is ill understood. In this paper, we study liquid state systems composed of n-alkanes, the coarse-grained (CG) potential of which may be assumed pairwise additive and has been obtained using the conditional reversible work (CRW) method. The CRW method is a free-energy-based coarse-graining procedure, which, by means of performing the coarse graining at pair level, rigorously provides a pair potential that describes the interaction free energy between two mapped atom groups (beads) embedded in their respective chemical environments. The pairwise nature of the interactions combined with their dependence on the chemically bonded environment makes CRW potentials ideally suited in studies of chemical transferability. We report CRW potentials for hexane using a mapping scheme that merges two heavy atoms in one CG bead. It is shown that the model is chemically and thermodynamically transferable to alkanes of different chain lengths in the liquid phase at temperatures between the melting and the boiling point under atmospheric (1 atm) pressure conditions. It is further shown that CRW-CG potentials may be readily obtained from a single simulation of the liquid state using the free energy perturbation method, thereby providing a fast and versatile molecular coarse graining method for aliphatic molecules. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4758936]