Different types of lamellar-within-lamellar structure formations in A-b-(B-b-A)(n)-b-C terpolymer melts, with a volume fraction of components A, B, and C in the ratio of 1:1:2, are analyzed in the strong segregation limit using a simple theoretical approach. We consider the lamellar, parallel lamellar-within-lamellar, and perpendicular lamellar-within-lamellar self-assembled states. The influen...

We study the free boundary problem describing the micro phase separation of diblock copolymer melts in the regime that one component has small volume fraction such that micro phase separation results in an ensemble of small spheres of one component. Mean-field models for the evolution of a large ensemble of such spheres have been formally derived in [6, 11]. It turns out that on a time scale of...

Dielectric relaxation spectroscopy has been used to investigate the normal-mode relaxation in disordered diblock copolymer melts far from the order-to-disorder transition (ODT). The dielectric spectra are analyzed in order to quantitatively obtain the distribution of relaxation times in the disordered diblocks. The width of the relaxation function shows significant broadening relative to the re...

A soft particle model for diblock (AB) copolymer melts is proposed. Each molecule is mapped onto two soft spheres built by Gaussian A- and B-monomer distributions. An approximate analytical expression for the joint distribution function for the distance between both spheres and their radii of gyration is derived, which determines the entropic contribution to the intramolecular free energy. Addi...

Certain systems, such as amphiphile solutions or diblock copolymer melts, may assemble into structures called “mesophases”, with properties intermediate between those of a solid and a liquid. These mesophases can be of very regular structure, but may contain defects and grain boundaries. Different visualization techniques such as volume rendering or isosurfacing of fluid density distributions a...

We present a systematic theory of polymer reaction kinetics at an interface separating two immiscible melts, A and B, in each of which a fraction of chains carry reactive end groups. We consider arbitrary values of local group reactivity, Qb, and reactive group densities in either bulk, nA ∞ and nB , with the convention nA e nB . At short times reaction kinetics are second order in bulk densiti...