Stability of the Double Gyroid Phase in Bottlebrush Diblock Copolymer Melts

So Jung Park, Guo Kang Cheong, Frank S. Bates, Kevin D. Dorfman

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

20 Scopus citations

Abstract

Bottlebrush block copolymers are emerging as promising materials for designing advanced materials with a number of unique properties engendered by densely grafted architectures. We used self-consistent field theory (SCFT) to determine how the stability of the double gyroid phase in a diblock copolymer melt is affected by converting one or both of the blocks of a linear diblock copolymer to a bottlebrush architecture. For architecturally symmetric polymers, the dominant effect of the bottlebrush is increasing segregation strength, whereupon the gyroid stability regions are effectively the same as linear diblock copolymers at equivalent segregation. In contrast, architectural asymmetry produced by coil-bottlebrush block polymers significantly impacts the gyroid stability region as a result of conformational asymmetry, which promotes spontaneous curvature. Gyroid is more stable when the coil blocks are in minority domains, which relieves packing frustration at the center of the gyroid nodes than in majority domains. Our results suggest that architectural asymmetry in bottlebrush block polymers can be a powerful design tool.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)9063-9070
Number of pages8
JournalMacromolecules
Volume54
Issue number19
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 12 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The authors thank Prof. David C. Morse for assistance with the SCFT code. This work was supported primarily by the National Science Foundation through the University of Minnesota MRSEC under Award Number DMR-2011401. The Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) at the University of Minnesota provided resources that contributed to the research results reported within this paper.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 American Chemical Society.

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