Mesophase formation in two-component cylindrical bottle-brush polymers

Abstract

When two types of side chains (A,B) are densely grafted to a (stiff) backbone and the resulting bottle-brush polymer is in a solution under poor solvent conditions, an incompatibility between A and B leads to microphase separation in the resulting cylindrical brush. The possible types of ordering are reminiscent of the ordering of block copolymers in cylindrical confinement. Starting from this analogy, Leibler's theory of microphase separation in block copolymer melts is generalized to derive a description of the system in the weak segregation limit. Also molecular dynamics simulation results of a corresponding coarse-grained bead-spring model are presented. Using side chain lengths up to N = 50 effective monomers, the ratio of the Lennard-Jones energy parameter between unlike monomers $({\epsilon }_{AB})$ and monomers of the same kind $({\epsilon }_{AA}={\epsilon }_{BB})$ is varied. Various correlation functions are analyzed to study the conditions when (local) Janus cylinder-type ordering and when (local) microphase separation in the direction along the cylinder axis occurs. Both the analytical theory and the simulations give evidence for short range order due to a tendency towards microphase separation in the axial direction, with a wavelength proportional to the side chain gyration radius, irrespective of temperature and grafting density, for a wide range of these parameters.

26 pages, 19 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Block copolymers confined in a nanopore: Pathfinding in a curving and frustrating flatland
• Structure of bottle-brush polymers in solution: A Monte Carlo test of models for the scattering function
• Intramolecular phase separation of copolymer "bottle brushes": No sharp phase transition but a tunable length scale

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Molecular dynamics simulations of single-component bottle-brush polymers with a flexible backbone under poor solvent conditions
• Structure of bottle-brush brushes under good solvent conditions. A molecular dynamics study
• A study for the static properties of symmetric linear multiblock copolymers under poor solvent conditions
• Patchy worm-like micelles: solution structure studied by small-angle neutron scattering
• Phase behavior of symmetric linear multiblock copolymers
• Analysis of the static properties of cluster formations in symmetric linear multiblock copolymers
• Phase behaviour of two-component bottle-brush polymers with flexible backbones under poor solvent conditions