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Impact of intrinsic backbone chain stiffness on the bottle-brush diblock copolymer morphology

Published

Author(s)

Panagiotis Theodorakis, Alexandros Chremos

Abstract

We investigate the role of the intrinsic backbone chain stiffness on the morphology behavior of bottle-brush diblock copolymers by using molecular dynamics simulations of a bead-spring coarse- grained model. We focus on bottle-brush having blocks of the same volume fraction, consisting of asymmetric in length side chains. We find that an increase of the backbone stiffness triggers an order-order transition from hexagonal packed cylinders to lamellae morphologies with asymmetric domain spacings. The latter morphology is of particular interest for the manufacturing of nanoporous and photonic materials. The change in the morphology is due to the effective many-body attractions between the blocks resulting in a parallel stacking that disrupts the symmetry of the cylindrical morphology.
Citation
Polymer
Volume
97

Keywords

bottle-brush, polymers, block copolymers, morphology, self-assembly

Citation

Theodorakis, P. and Chremos, A. (2016), Impact of intrinsic backbone chain stiffness on the bottle-brush diblock copolymer morphology, Polymer, [online], https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polymer.2016.05.034, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=920159 (Accessed March 28, 2024)
Created August 4, 2016, Updated October 12, 2021