ИСТИНА

Multiblock-copolymers with wide block-length distributions have attracted increasing attention during the last years due to the development of synthetic methods for their obtaining. Despite their promising properties, such systems are studied much less compared to monodisperse copolymers. While it has been shown experimentally that random multiblock copolymers can form microphase-separated structures, the overwhelming majority of such structures have no long-range order. In this work we study polymerization induced phase separation (PIPS) by means of dissipative dynamics simulations and show that the formation of ordered structures can be facilitated by the presence of a patterned surface, near which the synthesis of random multiblock copolymers occurs. An initially stable bicomponent blend of monomers (Flory-Huggins parameter χ<2) are polymerized via copolycondensation reaction; due to the formation of long blocks microphase separation occurs. We show that while in the bulk no long-range order is observed, the system undergoes the transition to a well-defined lamellar structure near a patterned substrate (see Fig.1); this structure is stable upon pattern removal. We analyze the reaction conditions under which structures with long-range order are formed and the block-length distributions characteristic of such states. We also show that while significantly different reaction conditions (for instance, slow and fast reaction) may lead to the same block-length distributions, the resulting structures are very different due to different distributions of blocks along the polymer chains.