POS1-0152
Forming and Aligning Nanoobjects via Polymerization-Induced Self-Assembly in Liquid Crystal Solvents
When and Where
Oct 3, 2025
12:00am - 12:00am
Presenter(s)
Seungmin Lee (KAIST)
Co-Author(s)
Abstract
Polymerization-induced self-assembly (PISA) enables the in situ self-assembly of amphiphilic diblock copolymers during their synthesis, providing block copolymer nanoobjects at high solids content in a single step. While highly symmetric morphologies such as spheres, cylinders, and vesicles are generally favored in the resulting nanoobjects with isotropic orientations, introducing anisotropy into the nanoobjects and aligning them to a specific direction requires new designs of the polymerization mixtures that offers anisotropic growth of the nanoobjects with external stimuli-sensitive orientation control.
To this end, we develop PISA in liquid crystalline (LC) molecules as a polymerization solvent to exploit the inherent nature of liquid crystalline molecules to be self-organized in the liquid state and aligned under external fields such as confinement and electric fields. In the LC-PISA scheme, we perform polymerization in the isotropic phase at high temperatures to produce nanoobjects following the conventional PISA principle but avoiding macroscopic phase separation. Once the monomer is fully consumed, subsequent cooling allows the polymerization mixture to enter the target LC phase, directing the alignment of the nanoobjects. Molecular design of the components comprising the polymerization mixture, phase transitions during the LC-PISA process, and the morphological and optical features of the resulting nanoobjects will be discussed in detail.
To this end, we develop PISA in liquid crystalline (LC) molecules as a polymerization solvent to exploit the inherent nature of liquid crystalline molecules to be self-organized in the liquid state and aligned under external fields such as confinement and electric fields. In the LC-PISA scheme, we perform polymerization in the isotropic phase at high temperatures to produce nanoobjects following the conventional PISA principle but avoiding macroscopic phase separation. Once the monomer is fully consumed, subsequent cooling allows the polymerization mixture to enter the target LC phase, directing the alignment of the nanoobjects. Molecular design of the components comprising the polymerization mixture, phase transitions during the LC-PISA process, and the morphological and optical features of the resulting nanoobjects will be discussed in detail.
