Prof. Qiu Feng’s group in the department of Macromolecular Science, Fudan University, published their recent work on the fabrication of a variety of mesocrystals by the self-assembly of designed multiblock copolymers on the Journal of the American Chemical Society on 14th February, 2014. In this paper, they proposed a new concept and dubbed it as “Macromolecular Metallurgy”, and accordingly proposed a universal design principle of ABC three-component multiblock copolymers for the fabrication of rich crystal structures in a mesoscale. Abiding by their design principle, their theoretical calculations predict more than ten mesocrystals, NaCl, CsCl, ZnS, AlB2, CaF2, Al2O3, and so on. This research makes a breakthrough of the block copolymer self-assembly into a variety of mesocrystals, which recasts the ionic or metallic crystals, and therefore brings more space for imagination to the applications of block copolymer self-assembly.

Design principle of ABC multiblock terpolymers self-assembling into rich mesocrystals

More Information:
“Nan Xie, Meijiao Liu, Hanlin, Deng, Weihua Li*, Feng Qiu, An-Chang Shi, Macromolecular metallurgy of binary mesocrystals via designed multiblock terpolymers, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2014, 136, 2974; http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/ja412760k