Investigating Polymer Transformation during the Encapsulation of Metal Nanoparticles by Polystyrene-b-Poly(acrylic acid) in Colloids

Colloidal self-assembly method holds great potential for large-scale synthesis at low expense of energy as compared to methods that assemble molecular by manipulating building blocks one after another. The development of the colloidal method, however, requires careful and intelligent design of the single building blocks as numerous degrees of freedom like isotropic nanoparticles generally form highly repetitive, lattice like structures or random aggregates upon self-assembly due to their identical surfaces throughout. Specifically, it is an interesting direction that if one can precisely control the localization of surface functionalities (i.e. ligands, or polymer shell) on the nanoparticles (NPs), a plethora of self-assembled structures (e.g., chains, sheets, rings, twisted and even staircase structures) would be possible. Despite numerous simulations and modelling for this type of NPs, just a handful literatures reported the controlling synthesis of metal-polymer patchy nanoparticles through polymer she...