Mesoscale Simulations of Liquid Crystalline Diblock Copolymers

Side-chain liquid crystal (SCLC) diblock copolymers possess the characteristics of both block copolymers and liquid crystalline polymers. This combination makes SCLC block copolymers useful for membrane separation applications and more responsive to external stimuli, enabling one to drive nanoscale assembly over large length scales. While particle-based and continuum methods have long been established for liquid crystalline materials, mesoscale methods that can capture structure on the 10-100 nm length scale have been relatively lacking. We have developed a mesoscale model that we are using to study both isotropic-to-nematic and smectic phases as well as the order-disorder phase transitions of SCLC diblock copolymers. We have studied the interference between the order to disorder transition of the block copolymer phases and the liquid crystal transitions, finding that the nematic phase suppresses the formation of phases without at least one direction of symmetry.