Structure of Polymer Tethered Highly Grafted Nanoparticles

Abstract

Spherical nanoparticles of silica grafted with a dense brush of low-polydispersity polymers prepared by living radical polymerization are shown to form ordered crystalline structures. The minimum distance between nanoparticle surfaces, a good measure of the end-to-end distance of the tethered polymers, scales as the square root of the molecular weight of the polymer chains. The blending of the grafted nanoparticles with homopolymers of matched and mismatched molecular weights indicates that the crystalline order persists even with high amounts of homopolymer added and for such diluted systems with as little as 0.7 vol % silica.