Modeling strategies for polyelectrolyte multilayers

The present article will give a short overview about the sparse attempts to model films made up by alternating layers of polyanions and polycations, called polyelectrolyte multilayers. First, we will review the current theoretical understanding of the field, followed by the description of the current modeling strategies, with a stress on pointing out their shortcomings. We then report some results of our our recent attempts to model the structure and dynamics of polyelectrolyte multilayers. We present two approaches: one deals with coarse-grained bead-spring models within a dielectric continuum solvent, and in the other attempt we try to infer the important microscopic interactions via a fully atomistic treatment of small oligomeric polyelectrolytes. We finally give an outlook and discuss possible extensions towards a more realistic modeling of polyelectrolyte multilayers.