Hybrid core@soft shell particles as adhesive elementary building blocks for colloidal crystals.
Résumé
A core@shell PBA-grafted silica particles which display highly smooth monodispersed shape and well self-organized polymer-grafted corona was developed. Indeed, the authors successfully synthesized with control surface initiated nitroxide mediated polymn. (SINMP), core@shell hybrid particles, with hard silica cores from 100 nm to 2 μm of diam. surrounded by a 10 nm to 100 nm polymer brushes thicknesses. The soft elastomeric mono-layer of such core@shell hybrid particles was potentially able to tune and optimize the inter-particle interactions credited to adhesion properties of the soft elastomeric mono-layer covalently grafted all around the silica beads. The intrinsic behavior of the PBA, as a tacky polymer, was directly obsd. by the auto-adhesion of layers from different particles. A linear variation of the dry polymer brushes length with the MW and the grafting d. was also shown. Such core@shell hybrids were then used as elementary adhesive building blocks.