Volume 41, Issue 1 pp. 93-110
Recent Advances

Precise and Controllable Assembly of Block Copolymers

Bixin Jin

Bixin Jin

School of Materials Science and Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081 China

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Yiqi Chen

Yiqi Chen

School of Materials Science and Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081 China

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Yunjun Luo

Yunjun Luo

School of Materials Science and Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081 China

Key Laboratory of High Energy Density Materials, Ministry of Education, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081 China

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Xiaoyu Li

Corresponding Author

Xiaoyu Li

School of Materials Science and Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081 China

Key Laboratory of High Energy Density Materials, Ministry of Education, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081 China

E-mail: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author
First published: 19 September 2022
Citations: 10

Dedicated to the Special Issue of Emerging Investigators in 2022.

Comprehensive Summary

With the development of nanotechnology, the precise synthesis of nanoparticles with nicely-defined dimensions and structures has been well-developed, and the functionalization and subsequent applications of the resultant nanostructures are becoming increasingly important. Comparing to inorganic nanoparticles, the nanostructures based on soft matters, especially block copolymer assemblies, are much lower in cost, easier to fabricate and richer in morphology. However, the dimensional control over the block copolymer assemblies is not as easy. Only in recent decade, with the discovery of living Crystallization-Driven Self-Assembly (CDSA) by Manners and Winnik, researchers become able to precisely tune the sizes of block copolymer assemblies in a relatively wide range. This discovery has inspired tremendous research effort in the self-assembly field, and considerable progress has been made recently. This review summarizes the main progress in the precise and controllable self-assembly field in the past five years, and is mostly focused on four aspects, including in-depth understanding of the assembly methods, extension of this method to two-dimensional nanostructures, utilization of this method to fabricate hierarchical structures, and the potential applications of these well-defined nanostructures. We hope not only to make a periodic systematic summary of previous studies, but also to provide some useful thinking for the future development of this field.image

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