  From understanding the sand on the beach to the foam on your beer, soft
sphere simulations have been crucial to the study of the amorphous world around
us. However, many of the materials we interact with on a daily basis aren't
comprised of individual grains, but complex molecules and chains of polymers.
By extending the soft sphere model to a model of linked spheres, we can learn
more about the materials we interact with on a daily basis. In this methods
paper, I show how one can find and study the physical properties of packings of
flexible chains, rigid molecules, and everything in between. In addition to
describing the energy landscape of these materials, these methods describe how
to shear stabilize polymer packings, classify them in the jamming hierarchy,
describe their elastic properties, and much more. This simple modification to
soft sphere simulations has the potential to yield new discoveries surrounding
glasses.
