What did the Scientists Discover?
Single crystals are materials with periodic structure that extends across macroscopic distances as a coherent lattice free of grain boundaries. By isolating and studying their properties, bulk single crystals have revolutionized our fundamental understanding of materials from semiconductors to biomacromolecules, fueling innovations from microelectronic devices to pharmaceutical compounds. In contrast, our understanding of many mesostructured materials is still in its infancy in part due to the lack of available single crystals. Block copolymer self-assembly of mesostructured systems presented here is a promising method to prepare periodic 10–100 nm structures with coherent orientation over macroscopic lengths enabling their study.
Why is this important?
The method presented here can prepare macroscopic bulk single crystals with other block copolymer systems, suggesting that the method is broadly applicable to block copolymer materials assembled by solvent evaporation. It is expected that such bulk single crystals will enable fundamental understanding and control of emergent mesostructure-based properties in block-copolymer-directed metal, semiconductor, and superconductor materials.
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Image: (extract, full image see here) Representative SAXS patterns with log scale colors from locations as indicated in (c), exhibiting polycrystalline (e), multi-(three) crystalline (f), and single crystal (g) behavior. Diagonal bars across bottom are shadows from photodiode wire.