We measured the form factor of bottle-brush macromolecules under good solvent conditions with small-angle neutron scattering and static light scattering. The systems under investigation are brushes, synthesized via the grafting-from route, built from a poly(alkyl methacrylate) backbone to which poly(n-butyl acrylate) side chains are densely grafted. The aim of our work is to study how the syste...

The photophysics of MEH-PPV incorporated into the pores of periodic silica hosts has been investigated in an effort to understand the role played by interchain aggregation and chain morphology in polaron production. In this work, guest/host interactions were used to incorporate MEH-PPV into the straight, homogeneous pores of hexagonal surfactant- or polymer-templated mesoporous silicas of varyi...

Immobilization of enzymes is interesting research topic from both fundamental and applied aspects, and various kinds of immobilization methods including chemical and physical procedures have been actively investigated, e.g. the chemical conjugation of enzyme with water-soluble polymers and the physical entrapment into polymer gel matrix (1-5). The advantages of enzyme-immobilization were improv...

The binding effects of osmolytes on the conformational behavior of grafted polymers are studied in this work. In particular, we focus on the interactions between urea and poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) brushes by monitoring the ellipsometric brush thickness for varying urea concentrations over a broad temperature range. The interpretation of the obtained data is supported by atomistic mol...

The conformational structure and the interchain aggregation behavior of a semirigid conjugated polymer bearing a decyl side chain, poly(2,3-diphenyl-5-decyl-1,4-phenylenevinylene) (DP10-PPV), in solutions with chloroform and toluene have been investigated by means of small-angle neutron scattering (SANS), static light scattering (SLS) and dynamic light scattering (DLS). The radius of gyration, ...

A formula is derived for stiffness of a polymer chain in terms of the distribution function of end-to-end vectors. This relationship is applied to calculate the stiffness of Gaussian chains (neutral and carrying electric charges at the ends), chains modeled as self-avoiding random walks, as well as semi-flexible (worm-like and Dirac) chains. The effects of persistence length and Bjerrum’s lengt...

The dynamics and statics of flexible polymer chains are based on their conformational entropy, resulting in the properties of isolated polymer chains with any branching potentially being characterized by Gaussian chain models. According to the graph-theoretical approach, the dynamics and statics of Gaussian chains can be expressed as a set of eigenvalues of their Laplacian matrix. As such, the ...

An end-grafted flexible polymer chain in three-dimensional space between two pistons undergoes an abrupt transition from a confined coil to a flowerlike conformation when the number of monomers in the chain, N, reaches a critical value. In two-dimensional (2D) geometry, excluded-volume interactions between monomers of a chain confined inside a strip of finite length 2L transform the coil confor...

– We propose that several mechanisms contribute to friction in a polymer melt adsorbed at a structured surface. The first one is the well known disentanglement of bulk polymer chains from the surface layer. However, if the surface is ideal at the atomic scale, the adsorbed parts of polymer chains can move along the equipotential lines of the surface potential. This gives rise to a strong slippa...