Synthesis and Self-Assembly of Well-Defined Star and Tadpole Homo-/Co-/Terpolymers

Georgios Polymeropoulos, Panagiotis Bilalis, Xueyan Feng, Edwin L. Thomas, Yves Gnanou, Nikos Hadjichristidis

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

17 Scopus citations

Abstract

Tadpole polymers are excellent candidates to explore how architecture can influence self-assembly because they combine two topologies in the same molecule (ring polymer as the head and linear polymer as the tail). In this work, we synthesize well-defined tadpole homo-/co-/terpolymers derived from the appropriate chemical modification reactions of the corresponding 3-miktoarm star homo-/co-/terpolymers via anionic polymerization, high vacuum techniques, and chlorosilane chemistry in combination with the Glaser coupling reaction. The 3-miktoarm star homo-/co-/terpolymers bear two arms with t-butyl dimethylsiloxypropyl functional end-groups, whereas after deprotection, the ω-hydroxyl chain-ends were modified to alkyne moieties. The dialkyne star polymers in the presence of Cu(I)Br and N,N,N′,N″,N″-pentamethyldiethylenetriamine were then transformed to well-defined tadpole homo-/co-/terpolymers. We employed strongly immiscible blocks to enable characterization using electron microscopy and X-ray scattering to explore how the molecular topology influences the self-assembled bulk-state microdomain morphologies.
Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)5583-5589
Number of pages7
JournalMacromolecules
Volume52
Issue number15
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 17 2019

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