How extreme conformational asymmetry alters the diblock copolymer phase diagram

Conformational asymmetry due to differences in chain flexibility and monomer packing in block copolymers frequently leads to skewing of the phase diagram, and in some cases, entirely new phases of block copolymers. One particularly extreme case of conformational asymmetry is that of a block copolymer consisting of a simple linear block, and a bottlebrush-like polymer block. In systems such as these it has been demonstrated through both strong stretching theory and experiment that the typical diblock phase diagram is drastically altered due to interfacial bending that occurs in order to accommodate the bottlebrush block at the interface. However, existing studies have thus far not examined two key areas of the phase diagram: the order disorder transition, and how it shifts in these extreme cases of asymmetry, and distortion of the phase diagram where the bottlebrush volume fraction is much smaller than the linear block fraction. In this talk I present results answering both of these questions obtained through a simulation study of a model copolymer with asymmetric bottlebrush component.