Equilibrium and non-equilibrium molecular dynamics approaches for the linear viscoelasticity of polymer melts

Viscoelastic properties of polymer melts are particularly challenging to compute due to the intrinsic stress fluctuations in molecular dynamics (MD). We compared equilibrium and non-equilibrium MD approaches for extracting the storage (G′) and loss moduli (G″) over a wide frequency range from a bead-spring chain model in both unentangled and entangled regimes. We found that, with properly chosen data processing and noise reduction procedures, …