We report the morphology and phase behaviors of blend thin films containing two polystyrene-b-poly(methyl methacrylate) (PS-b-PMMA) diblock copolymers with different blending compositions induced by a selective solvent for the PMMA block, which were studied by transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The neat asymmetric PS-b-PMMA diblock copolymers employed in this study, respectively coded as a...

An injectable PEG/polyester thermogel with strong X-ray opacity was designed and synthesized through the conjugation of 2,3,5-triiodobenzoic acid to the hydrophobic end of the mPEG-PLA diblock copolymer for the first time.

Well-ordered Ag nanoparticle arrays with high particle density were fabricated by photochemical reduction of domain-selective Ag(+)-loading on hydrophobic polystyrene-block-poly(4-vinylpyridine) (PS-b-P4VP) self-assembled diblock copolymer templates.

A simple method based on UV/ozone treatment is proposed to control the surface energy of dense grafted silane layers for orientating block copolymer mesophases. Our method allows one to tune the surface energy down to a fraction of a mN/m. We show that related to the surface, perpendicular orientation of a lamellar phase of a PS-PMMA diblock copolymer (neutral surface) is obtained for a critica...

PEG-modified diblock copolymer surfaces have been examined for their compatibility with microelectrode array based analytical methods. The use of PEG-modified polymer surfaces on the arrays was initially problematic because the redox couples used in the experiments were adsorbed by the polymer. This led the current measured by cyclic voltammetry for the redox couple to be unstable and increase ...

We consider a bistable reaction-diffusion system arising in the theory of phase transitions; it appears in several physical contexts such as thin magnetic films and the microphase separation in diblock copolymer melts. Mathematically it takes the form of an Allen-Cahn equation coupled to an elliptic equation. This system possesses a Lyapunov functional which represents the Gibbs free energy of ...

Poly(styrene)-b-poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PS-b-PNIPAM) amphiphilic diblock copolymers were synthesized via reverse iodine transfer polymerization (RITP) firstly. And then the honeycomb structured porous films were fabricated by drop the amphiphilic diblock copolymer solutions on glass substrates. The porous films were characterized using field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) an...

An efficient numerical self-consistent field theory (SCFT) algorithm is developed for treating structured polymers on spherical surfaces. The method solves the diffusion equations of SCFT with a pseudospectral approach that combines a spherical-harmonics expansion for the angular coordinates with a modified real-space Crank–Nicolson method for the radial direction. The self-consistent field equ...

Existence and stability of stationary internal layered solutions to a rescaled diblock copolymer equation are studied in higher dimensional space. Rescaling is necessary since the characteristic domain size of any stable pattern eventually vanishes in an appropriate singular limit. A general sufficient condition for the existence of singularly perturbed solutions and the associated stability cr...