Boundary Tension Between Coexisting Phases of a Block Copolymer Blend
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Self-consistent field theory (SCFT) is used to evaluate the excess free energy per unit area (i.e., tension) of different boundaries (or interfaces) between the coexisting phases of a block copolymer blend. In this first study of its kind, we focus on the boundaries separating the short- and long-period lamellar phases that form in mixtures of small and large symmetric diblock copolymers of polymerizations N s and N l, respectively, when N s ≪ N l . According to strong-segregation theory (SST), the tension is minimized when both sets of lamellae orient parallel to the boundary, but experiments [ Hashimoto,, Macromolecules 1994, 27, 1562] tend to observe kink boundaries instead, where the domains of one lamellar phase evolve continuously into those of the other lamellar phase. Our more refined SCFT calculations, on the other hand, do predict a lower tension for the kink boundary consistent with the experimental observations. For completeness, we also examine the boundaries that form when the short-period lamellar phase disorders, and again the SCFT results are in agreement with experiment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".