Probing the size of coacervate core micelles

Coacervate core micelles, composed of diblock copolymers with oppositely charged blocks forming the core and neutral, hydrophilic blocks forming the corona, are of use for applications including drug delivery as the core can encapsulate hydrophilic, charged cargo. For such applications, it is essential to understand how the polymer architecture can be used to tune the size of these micelles. Using a model that captures the essential physics coupled with computational methods, we probe how the core size, corona size, and aggregation number.