Exotic Phase Behaviors of Purposely Designed Dendron-Like Block Copolymers

Within a series of purposely designed dendron-like AB-type block copolymers, self-consistent field theory (SCFT) calculations reveal that the regions of spherical phases can be extended to a volume fraction over 0.5, along with the vanishing of most traditional phases and the emergence of bicontinuous P phase as well as some exotic cylindrical phases. By changing the control parameter τ from 0 to ∞, these dendron-like copolymers can be reduced to dendritic block copolymers or miktoarm AB_n block copolymers, respectively, which both exhibit similar phase behaviors to that of the simplest AB diblock copolymer. To demonstrate how spherical regions change non-monotonically as τ, we construct a large set of phase diagrams for different τ values. We observe many exotic phase behaviors in these phase diagrams, especially about the change of the stability regions of different spherical phases including the classical BCC phase and complex Frank-Kasper phases.
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