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The widely used double-bridging hybrid (DBH) method for equilibratingsimulated entangled polymer melts [R. Auhl et al., J. Chem. Phys. v. 119, p.12718, 2003] loses its effectiveness as chain stiffness increases into thesemiflexible regime because the energy barriers associated with double-bridgingMonte Carlo moves become prohibitively high. Here we overcome this issue bycombining DBH with the use of core-softened pair potentials. This reduces theenergy barriers substantially, allowing us to equilibrate melts with $N \simeq40 N_e$ and chain stiffnesses all the way up to the isotropic-nematictransition using simulations of no more than 100 million timesteps. Forsemiflexible chains, our method is several times faster than standard DBH; weexploit this speedup to develop improved expressions for Kremer-Grest melts'chain-stiffness-dependent Kuhn length $\ell_K$ and entanglement length $N_e$.

Facile equilibration of well-entangled semiflexible bead-spring polymer melts