A theoretical study for nanoparticle partitioning in the lamellae of diblock copolymers.

Morphology control is important for practical applications of composite materials that consist of functional polymers and nanoparticles. Toward that end, block copolymers provide useful templates to arrange nanoparticles in the scaffold of self-organized polymer microdomains. This paper reports theoretical predictions for the distribution of nanoparticles in the lamellar structures of symmetric diblock copolymers on the basis of a polymer density functional theory (DFT) and the potential distribution theorem (PDT). The DFT predicts periodic spacing of lamellar structures in good agreement with molecular dynamics simulations. With the polymer structure from DFT as the input, the PDT is used to examine the effects of particle size, surface energy, polymer chain length, and compressibility on the distribution of nanoparticles in the limit of low particle density. It is found that the nanoparticle distribution depends not only on the particle size and surface energy but also on the local structure of the microdomain interface, polymer chain length, and compressibility. The theoretical predictions are compared well with experiments and simulations.