Can polymer coils be modeled as "soft colloids"?

We map dilute or semidilute solutions of nonintersecting polymer chains ont o a fluid of "soft" particles interacting via a concentration dependent eff ective pair potential, by inverting the pair distribution function of the c enters of mass of the initial polymer chains. A similar inversion is used t o derive an effective wall-polymer potential; these potentials are combined to successfully reproduce the calculated exact depletion interaction induc ed by nonintersecting polymers between two walls. The mapping opens up the possibility of large-scale simulations of polymer solutions in complex geom etries.