Nanometric Sieving of Polymer Coils by a Lamellar Liquid Crystal: Surfactant AOT and Polydimethylacrylamide

Abstract

The liquid crystal formed by surfactant AOT/water mixtures in its lamellar mesophase at a spacing between lamellae, d, equal to 8 nm, is mixed with poly(dimethylacrylamide) (PDMAA) polymers of low molecular weight in the range Mn= 2−20 × 103; the polymers are synthesized by living radical polymerization. The lowest molecular weights do not affect d significantly, indicating that the polymer coils penetrate inside the lamellar phase and dissolve in the water layers. With higher molecular weights, d decreases with added polymer, this decrease being stronger as the molecular weight of the polymer is higher, and the mixture becomes microheterogeneous. This indicates that the higher-molecular-weight polymers are segregated in a separate microphase that partially deswells the lamellae and that this segregation increases with the molecular weight of the polymer. The law, which governs the deswelling of lamella with added polymer, is deduced assuming that a fraction of each polymer can dissolve in the lamellar p...