Design rule for the practical creation of hyperuniform materials

Disordered hyperuniform materials are characterized by a suppression of large scale density fluctuations, making these highly “jammed” materials useful in many applications in which low compressibility and material isotropy are required. However, design rules for the practical creation of hyperuniform materials have not yet been determined. Towards establishing design rules for hyperuniform materials, we investigated the nature of long-range density fluctuations in melts of model “soft” polymers, specifically stars and bottlebrushes, over a wide temperature range by molecular dynamics simulation. The cores of the stars and the backbones of bottlebrush polymers are found to have a hyperuniform distribution, i.e., they exhibit anomalously small density fluctuations over a wide temperature range above the glass transition temperature. The hyperuniformity of these substituent polymer subregion is hidden since the fluid as a whole does not exhibit this property. These findings offer a strategy for the practical design of hyperuniform polymeric materials.