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Unpublished Paper
Undulated Cylinders of Charged Diblock Copolymers
European Physical Journal E (2006)
  • Gregory M. Grason
  • Christian Santangelo
Abstract

We study the cylinder to sphere morphological transition of diblock copolymers in aqueous solution with a hydrophobic block and a charged block. We find a metastable undulated cylinder configuration for a range of charge and salt concentrations which, nevertheless, occurs above the threshold where spheres are thermodynamically favorable. By modeling the shape of the cylinder ends, we find that the free-energy barrier for the transition from cylinders to spheres is quite large and that this barrier falls significantly in the limit of high polymer charge and low solution salinity. This suggests that observed undulated cylinder phases are kinetically trapped structures.

Disciplines
Publication Date
July 27, 2006
Comments
Prepublished version downloaded from ArXiv. Published version is located at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1140%2Fepje%2Fi2006-10025-1 DOI: 10.1140/epje/i2006-10025-1
Citation Information
Gregory M. Grason and Christian Santangelo. "Undulated Cylinders of Charged Diblock Copolymers" European Physical Journal E (2006)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/christian_santangelo/34/