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Soft Matter

Where physics meets chemistry meets biology for fundamental soft matter research.




Review

Soft Matter, 2006, 2, 573 - 583, DOI: 10.1039/b602610a


Morphology of multi-component polymer systems: single chain in mean field simulation studies

Kostas Ch. Daoulas, Marcus Müller, Juan J. de Pablo, Paul F. Nealey and Grant D. Smith


Recent work exploring phase separation and self-assembly in multicomponent polymer fluids using a particle-based self-consistent field simulation method is reviewed. The computational method is placed in the context of classical molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo simulations as well as field-theoretic approaches. Its potential is illustrated by applications ranging from spinodal decomposition in symmetric polymer blends and the ordering of diblock copolymers in the bulk to more complex phenomena such as solvent evaporation from thin polymer films and the fabrication of three-dimensional bicontinuous diblock copolymer morphologies via reconstruction on patterned substrates.

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