Published in

National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 27(116), p. 13194-13199, 2019

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1900121116

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Stability of the A15 phase in diblock copolymer melts

This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.

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Abstract

Significance Block copolymers are prevalent throughout industry and academe due to their self-assembly into well-ordered nanostructures, but only a handful of morphologies are known with the simplest materials built from two chemically distinct blocks. In this article, we report that AB diblock copolymers can also self-assemble into a structure known as the A15 phase. Theory and experiments indicate A15 occurs throughout a substantial region of phase space with suitable differences in the space-filling characteristics of each block. The observed temperature-dependent phase transitions can only be explained using fully fluctuating field-theoretic simulations, which provide evidence that composition fluctuations play a key role in the self-assembly of block copolymers into the larger class of tetrahedrally close-packed sphere phases.