• DOI:10.1021/ACS.MACROMOL.6B02446
• Corpus ID: 53985702

Self-Assembled Structures of Giant Surfactants Exhibit a Remarkable Sensitivity on Chemical Compositions and Topologies for Tailoring Sub-10 nm Nanostructures

@article{Yue2017SelfAssembledSO,
  title={Self-Assembled Structures of Giant Surfactants Exhibit a Remarkable Sensitivity on Chemical Compositions and Topologies for Tailoring Sub-10 nm Nanostructures},
  author={Kan Yue and Chang Liu and Mingjun Huang and Jiahao Huang and Zhe Zhou and Kan Wu and Hao Liu and Zhiwei Lin and An‐Chang Shi and Wen‐Bin Zhang and Stephen Z. D. Cheng},
  journal={Macromolecules},
  year={2017},
  volume={50},
  pages={303-314}
}

• K. Yue, Chang Liu, +8 authors Stephen Z. D. Cheng
• Published 10 January 2017
• Materials Science, Chemistry
• Macromolecules

We report a remarkable sensitivity of self-assembled structures of giant surfactants on their chemical compositions and molecular topology, which facilitate the engineering of various nanophase-separated structures with sub-10 nm feature sizes. Two classes of giant surfactants composed of various functionalized polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxane (POSS) heads tethered with one or two polystyrene (PS) tails were efficiently prepared from common precursors of vinyl-substituted POSS–PS conjugates via one-step “thiol–ene” postpolymerization functionalization. With identical molecular weights of the PS tails, the resulting giant surfactants exhibited distinct highly ordered phases, as evidenced by small-angle X-ray scattering and transmission electron microscopy observations. Moreover, comparison between the topological isomers revealed that the self-assembled structures are also highly sensitive to molecular topology. Introduction of two PS tails with half-length not only shifted the boundaries between diffe...