Bottom-Up Synthesis of Polymeric Micro- and Nanoparticles with Regular Anisotropic Shapes

Abstract

Shape-anisotropic polymeric micro- and nanoparticles are of significant interest for the development of novel composite materials, lock-and-key assemblies, and drug carriers. Currently, syntheses require external confinement in microfluidic devices or lithographic techniques associated with significant infrastructure and low productivity, so new methods are necessary to scale-up such production efficiently. Here we report bottom-up polymerization of regular shape-anisotropic particles (polygonal platelets with different numbers of edges, with and without protruding asperities, and fibrilar particles with controllable aspect ratios), with size control over 4 orders of magnitude (∼50 nm–1 mm). Polymerization also enables the study of much smaller shapes than could previously be studied in water suspensions, and we study the fundamental limits of the self-shaping transition process driving these transformations for monomer oil droplets of stearyl methacrylate (SMA) monomer oil. We show the method is compatib...