BACKGROUND IV delivery of volatile fluorinated anesthetics has a number of potential advantages when compared with the current inhalation method of administration. We reported previously that the IV delivery of sevoflurane can be achieved through an emulsion composed of a linear fluorinated diblock copolymer, a stabilizer, and the anesthetic. However, this original emulsion was subject to parti...

10 11 Both visible and infrared (IR) spectroscopic ellipsometry have been employed to study the 12 structure of thin layers of bovine submaxillary mucin (BSM) adsorbed on poly(acrylic acid13 block-methyl methacrylate) (PAA-b-PMMA) copolymer and poly(methyl methacrylate) 14 surfaces at three pH values (3, 7 and 10). The adsorbed mucin layer on the copolymer surface 15 had the greatest thickness ...

A class of dialkoxyanthracene-containing diblock copolymers is synthesized which possesses visible light-responsivity. These copolymers can self-assemble into a micellar structure in water. Green visible light (540 nm) is able to scissor these anthracene species and cleave the diblock copolymer into two fragments, inducing disassembly of the self-assembled micelles.

Block copolymers have long been studied for their theories and applications especially in nanotechnology.1-5 They have periodic structures with 10-100 nm long microphase separated domains which can be controlled by the molecular weight and composition of the block copolymer. Regulating these two parameters, one can prepare thin films with different morphologies over large areas. The patterns fo...

The cross section of a diblock copolymer in the cylindrical phase is made up of a large number of microdomains of small discs with high concentration of the minority monomers. Often several ring like microdomains appear among the discs. We show that a ring like structure may exist as a stable solution of a free boundary problem derived from the Ohta-Kawasaki theory of diblock copolymers. The ex...

The LCST-transitions of linear, well-defined polymers of N-isopropylacrylamide (NIPAM) and N-vinylcaprolactam (VCL), including a homopolymer mixture, diblock and statistical copolymers, in water are explored and compared by applying turbidity and FTIR measurements in combination with two-dimensional correlation spectroscopy (2Dcos). Only one transition is observed in all polymer systems, sugges...

We perform a self-consistent-field/density-functional-theory hybrid analysis for a system of diblock copolymers mixed with polydisperse, hard, spherical particles of various chemical species. We apply this theory to study the equilibrium morphologies of two different binary sphere/diblock melts. First, we examine the case where the particles have two different sizes, but both types are preferen...

High-density polymer brushes on substrates exhibit unique properties and functions stemming from the extended conformations due to the surface constraint. To date, such chain organizations have been mostly attained by synthetic strategies of surface-initiated living polymerization. We show herein a new method to prepare a high-density polymer brush architecture using surface segregation and sel...

Pure diblock copolymer melts exhibit a narrow range of conditions at which bicontinuous and cocontinuous phases are stable; such conditions and the morphology of such phases can be tuned by the use of additives. In this work, we have studied a bidisperse system of diblock copolymers using theory and simulation. In particular, we elucidated how a short, lamellar-forming diblock copolymer modifie...

We have systematically studied the equilibrium structure and dynamics of a polymeric bicontinuous microemulsion (BμE) composed of poly(cyclohexylethylene) (PCHE), poly(ethylene) (PE), and a volumetrically symmetric PCHE-PE diblock copolymer, using dynamic mechanical spectroscopy, small angle X-ray and neutron scattering, and transmission electron microscopy. The BμE was investigated over an 80 ...