CPOS Seminar: Theory of Sequenced Supramolecular Polymers

Speaker: Christopher Balzer, Postdoctoral Researcher, Fredrickson Group, Materials Research Lab, UCSB

Abstract: Polymers imbued with reversible bonds exhibit unique and tunable thermodynamic and dynamic properties that are attractive for a wide array of applications, such as self-assembly and blend compatibilization. Exact theoretical description of these reversible bonds has been challenging due to the difficulty in counting the (possibly infinite) reaction products; however, recent theoretic developments using a coherent states (CS) field theory framework have overcome this difficulty. Up to this point, this CS framework has only been used to describe relatively simple polymer architectures with end-reactive groups. In this talk, I will discuss the extension of the CS framework to study to polymers with reversible bonds distributed along the polymer backbone, opening a broad array of new materials that can be studied with theoretical methods. We use this powerful framework to discern the role of functionalized monomer sequence and density on the phase behavior of polymer solutions (gelation) and polymer blends.