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Nature of the Effective Interaction Between Dendrimers

We have performed fully atomistic classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to calculate the effective interaction between two polyamidoamine (PAMAM) dendrimers. Using the umbrella sampling (US) technique, we have obtained the potential of mean force (PMF) between the dendrimers and investigated the effects of protonation level and dendrimer size on the PMF. Our results show that the interaction between the dendrimers can be tuned from purely repulsive to partly attractive by changing the protonation level. The PMF profiles are well-fitted by the sum of an exponential and a Gaussian function with the weight of the exponential function dominating over that of the Gaussian function. This observation is in disagreement with the results obtained in previous analytic [Macromolecules 34, 2914 (2001)] and coarse-grained simulation [J. Chem. Phys. 120, 7761 (2004)] studies which predicted the effective interaction to be Gaussian.