Effect of monomer sequences on conformations of copolymers grafted on spherical nanoparticles: a Monte Carlo...

Functionalizing nanoparticles with organic ligands, such as oligomers, polymers, DNA, and proteins, is an attractive way to manipulate the interfacial interactions between the nanoparticles and the medium the particles are placed in, and thus control the nanoparticle assembly. In this paper we have conducted a Monte Carlo simulation study on copolymer grafted spherical nanoparticles to show the tremendous potential of using monomer sequence on the copolymers to tune the grafted chain conformation, and thus the effective interactions between copolymer grafted nanoparticles. We have studied AB copolymers with alternating, multiblock, or diblock sequences, where either A monomers or B monomers have monomer-monomer attractive interactions. Our focus has been to show the nontrivial effect of monomer sequence on the conformations of the grafted copolymers at various particle diameters, grafting densities, copolymer chain lengths, and monomer-monomer interactions in an implicit small molecule solvent. We observe that the monomer sequence, particle diameter, and grafting density dictate whether (a) the grafted chains aggregate to bring attractive monomers from multiple grafted chains together (interchain and intrachain monomer aggregation) if the enthalpy gained by doing so offsets the entropic loss caused by stretching of chains, or (b) each grafted chain folds onto itself to bring its attractive monomers together (only intrachain monomer aggregation) if the entropic loss from interchain aggregation cannot be overcome by the enthalpic gain. For six copolymers of chain length N=24 grafted on a spherical particle of diameter D=4, interchain and intrachain monomer aggregation occurs, and the radius of gyration varies nonmonotonically with increasing blockiness of the monomer sequence. At larger particle diameters the grafted chains transition to purely intrachain monomer aggregation. The radius of gyration varies monotonically with monomer sequence for intrachain monomer aggregation because as the sequence becomes blockier (like monomers are grouped together), the copolymer chain has to fold less compactly to maximize the enthalpically favorable contacts while maintaining high conformational entropy. The radius of gyration of alternating and diblock copolymers scales with chain length N through a power law (1/2) = alphaN(nu) with the prefactor alpha and scaling exponent nu, varying with monomer sequence and monomer-monomer attraction strength.