Novel coarse-graining approach for Star polymer and linear Homopolymer mixtures

We present a novel coarse-graining approach, suitable for star polymer mixtures. The approach is based on the calculation of the effective interaction between a star polymer and a single monomer, which can be used to coarse-grain the interaction between a star and a complex object. The effective interaction has been calculated numerically for star polymers of different functionalities $f$ and for different degrees of polymerization $N$. We find that these potentials can be scaled following the star polymer scaling laws. We test our approach, calculating the effective interaction between a star polymer and a linear homopolymer, comparing the results obtained from coarse graining and monomer resolved simulations. We employ this technique to study star - linear homopolymer mixtures, focusing on the limit of very long homopolymers.