Abstract
We study self-assembly of a binary mixture of components A and B confined in a slit-like pore with the walls modified by the stripes of tethered brushes made of beads of a sort A. The emphasis is on solvent mediated transitions between morphologies when the composition of the mixture varies. For certain limiting cases of the pore geometry we found that an effective reduction of the dimensionality may lead to a quasi one- and two-dimensional demixing. The change of the environment for the chains upon changing the composition of the mixture from polymer melt to a good solvent conditions provides explanation for the mechanism of development of several solvent mediated morphologies and, in some cases, for switching between them. We found solvent mediated lamellar, meander and in-lined cylinder phases. Quantitative analysis of morphology structure is performed considering brush overlap integrals and gyration tensor components.
Highlights
In recent years investigations of polymer films on solid surfaces have become one of the most rapidly growing research area in physics, chemistry, and material science
Since many of the modern technologically relevant phenomena occur at the nanoscale, the behavior of polymer thin films deposited on a flat surface that exhibit morphologies at the nanoscale has been one of major focuses in recent years [6, 8, 17,18,19,20,21,22]
The sub-regions dominated by a brush, reduce the volume accessible for the demixing of A and B beads to quasi-2D slabs, especially for moderate values of pore size d. This is demonstrated in figure 2, where we show examples of the morphologies observed for wide stripes with w = 90 in a pore of size of d = 20 when the fraction fB is varied
Summary
In recent years investigations of polymer films on solid surfaces have become one of the most rapidly growing research area in physics, chemistry, and material science. Advances in nanotechnology have permitted the establishment of methods for obtaining functional polymeric films on solid surfaces exhibiting quite complex topographic nanostructures Such chemically decorated substrates allow for manipulation of fluid at very short length scales and can play an important role in a variety of contexts [24,25,26,27,28,29,30]. Theoretical studies of fluids in contact with brushes on patterned surfaces have been mainly based on different simulation methods.
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