Polymeric Material Platforms to Grow Polymer Brushes with Controlled Structures and Properties

초록

Polymer brushes are comprised of polymer chains tethered to the substrate via a terminal group, and are used in a diverse range of applications which require permanent surface modification. In this talk, we describe a highly versatile universal “grafting-from” approach to grow polymer brushes from a variety of substrates with controlled grafting density by using single component random copolymers, which contains crosslinkable units to form a stable film and functionalities for surface-initiated atom transfer radical polymerization. The chemistry of the coating was further modified to implement a bottom-up approach: by assembling a block copolymer on top of the coating, nanopatterned brushes were grown after selective removal of one domain from block copolymer template. The ease of synthesis, chemical tunability, homogeneous surface, chemical stability and applicability to a wide range of substrates makes this a versatile approach to create functionalized interfaces.