Nanospheres with an internal bicontinuous structure were obtained through hierarchical self-assembly of a dendritic block terpolymer in selective solvents. The self-assembly underwent a unique three stage process involving unimolecular micelle formation, multimicelle aggregation and microphase separation within a self-confined space. Reversible phase inversion of the nanospheres in response to ...

To investigate the influence of fluctuation effects on conditions of microphase separation in two-component incompressible molten block copolymers of complicated chemical structure an altemative and more general fornlulation of the weak crystallization theory is developed using a new variational principle for the calculation of the free

The microphase separation of diblock copolymers in the presence of an external force field is simulated by means of a cell dynamical system model. It is found that the pattern formation is greatly affected by the presence of the field and by the type of boundary conditions considered. 64.60.Cn, 61.41.+e, 64.75.+g Typeset using REVTEX

We analyze the freezing transition in a system of hard particles with a very long-ranged repulsion. The long-range repulsion makes first-order freezing transitions continuous, but leaves the initial stages of the crystallization unchanged: the crystal phase must still nucleate. The coexistence between bulk phases is replaced by microphase separation.

A detailed molecular dynamics simulation study is described for a polysiloxane side chain liquid crystal polymer (SCLCP). The simulations use a coarse-grained model composed of a combination of isotropic and anisotropic interaction sites. On cooling from a fully isotropic polymer melt, we see spontaneous microphase separation into polymer-rich and mesogen-rich regions. Upon application of a sma...