Fabrication of composite thin films with microstructures of honeycomb, foam, and nanosphere arrays through adsorption and self-assembly of block copolymers at the liquid/liquid interface

Unique self-assembly behavior of amphiphilic block copolymers at liquid/liquid interfaces

“…14 PS-b-P2VP with 7500 and 12 500 g mol À1 molecular weights of the two blocks self-assembled into honeycomb structures at liquid/liquid interfaces formed by polymer chloroform solution with a concentration of 0.2 mg mL À1 and aqueous solutions of HAuCl 4 and AgNO 3 with concentrations of 1 Â 10 À3 and 1 Â 10 À2 mol L À1 , respectively. 14 This unique structure is different from micro-and nanostructures formed by PS-b-P2VP in solutions, spincoating or dip-coating lms, and Langmuir monolayers and is also different from the structures formed by other amphiphilic block copolymers, such as PS-b-P4VP, 15 P2VP-b-PS-b-P2VP, 17 P4VP-b-PS-b-P4VP 15 and PtBMA-b-P2VP, 16 and homopolymer P2VP [37][38][39] at liquid/ liquid interfaces. We propose a possible mechanism for the formation of the honeycomb structure that includes adsorption of polymer molecules, formation of building blocks through microphase separation, and further self-assembly of these building blocks.…”

“…, and Ag + ions and formed composite thin lms at oil/water interfaces. [14][15][16][17] We also found that these block copolymers exhibited distinct adsorption and self-assembly behaviors that differed from air/water interface and were greatly affected by the structures of the polymers and the inorganic species in the aqueous phase.…”

A new and facile way to fabricate catalytically active block copolymer/Au nanoparticle multilayer thin films at the air/liquid interface

“…The first pair of peaks at 85.2/88.9 eV was assigned to 4f 7/2 and 4f 5/2 of the spin-orbit coupling of Au(0), which means that some AuCl 4 − ions were reduced by DMF in the self-assembly process. 7b), two symmetric peaks appeared at 84.9 and 88.6 eV, which correspond to 4f 7/2 and 4f 5/2 of Au(0), 42 respectively, indicating that almost all the AuCl 4 − anions were reduced. 59,60 This is consistent with the mean size of the nanoparticles shown in Fig.…”

“…7. 42 The binding energy of 85.2 eV is much greater than that of bulk Au(0), 57,58 indicating the formation of smaller gold nanoparticles in the composite film, because the binding energy of Au(0) increases with decreasing particle size. In the spectrum of the as-prepared PB-b-P4VP/Au composite film shown in Fig.…”

“…35,36,42 The unique catalytic feature of the PB-b-P4VP composite film was attributed to the compact multilayer structure in which catalytic Au nanoparticles were homogeneously incorporated. In general, when a composite film is used as catalyst, k app either remained constant or decreased with increasing reaction cycles, depending on the stability of the catalyst film.…”