PSCF is a software package for field-theoretic analysis of inhomogeneous equilibrium states of polymeric materials. It is designed to treat materials containing block polymers or homopolymers in which spatially inhomogeneous structures form as the result of a tendency of constituents to phase separate. It can be used to model periodic ordered phases, micelles, and interfaces. PSCF was originally designed as a package for numerical solution of the the Edwards-Helfand self-consistent field theory (SCFT) of inhomogeneous equilibrium structures. Recent versions of the code have been extended to also allow the user to perform field theoretic simulations that rely on a partial saddle-point approximation.
PSCF is designed to treat arbitrary incompressible mixtures of block polymers (including homopolymers as a special case) and point-particle solvents.The package is most often used used to treat spatially periodic structures (i.e., ordered phases) formed by molten block polymers or solutions that contain block polymers. PSCF also provides a simple program for treating one-dimensional problems in spherical, cylindrical or Cartesian coordinates, which is useful for simulating interfaces and spherical or cylindrical micelles.
History and versions
The current version of PSCF is a package of programs written in C++ and CUDA, using CUDA for operations that are executed on a graphics processing unit (GPU). An earlier version of PSCF that was written in Fortran 90 is still available but is no longer being developed or patched to fix bugs. Both versions of the package are open source software that were designed to be compiled and used in a unix-like environment, including linux or the unix command-line interface to Apple OS X. All new users should use the current C++/CUDA version, and users of the legacy Fortran version should consider switching to the new version when they can.
Much more detailed information about both versions is available via links at the top of this page, which provide access to online documentation and source code for both versions of PSCF.