Extended conformations of isolated molecular bottle-brushes: Influence of side-chain topology
✍ Scribed by Mika Saariaho; Igal Szleifer; Olli Ikkala; Gerrit ten Brinke
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 502 KB
- Volume
- 7
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1022-1344
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✦ Synopsis
A Monte Car10 study is presented to discuss the influence of the side-chain topology on the enhancement of the persistence length of a molecular bottle-brush in a dilute athermal solution due to the excluded volume interactions between the side chains. The structures investigated consisted of freely jointed backbones of 100 hard spheres (beads) of diameter 1 to which 50 equally flexible side chains were grafted. The diameter of the side-chain beads was varied from 1 to 3 in the same units. For every given size of the side-chain bead, the length of the side chains was varied from 4 to 20 beads. The ratio between the persistence length and the bottle-brush diameter, which is the determining factor for lyotropic behavior of conventional semi-flexible chains, was found to be almost independent of the side-chain length. At the same time, it was found to increase considerably with increasing size of the side-chain beads, suggesting that by a proper choice of the chemistry lyotropic behavior of molecular bottle-brushes due to excluded-volume interactions between the side chains might be achieved. Moreover, relatively short side chains can be used since the sidechain length has only a minor influence on the ratio between the persistence length and the diameter. These findings are in a good agreement with recent experimental observations.