Polygonal Micellar Aggregates of a Triblock Terpolymer Containing a Liquid Crystalline Block
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Block copolymers self-assemble in block-selective solvents into diverse nanometer-sized micellar aggregates (MAs). Understanding the formation mechanisms of these morphologies is challenging but important for the design and synthesis of block copolymer architectural materials. Here we report our discovery that polygonal or enclosed cylindrical MAs bearing sharp bends can be formed from a triblock terpolymer containing a liquid crystalline block. We propose that the sharp bends are formed mainly to enable approximately straight sides in which the liquid crystalline packing of the core block is facilitated and the cylinder bending energy is reduced. However, this energy reduction is counteracted by an energy increase due to the concentration of smectic edge dislocations at the vertices. Thus, polygonal MAs are formed only when the toroidal MAs are sufficiently small and the cylinders experience significant bending. We theoretically estimate critical toroidal size below which the transition from round toroids to polygons occurs. This estimated size agrees with our experimental observations, supporting our hypothesis and analysis.
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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) | 0.002 | 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".