Effects of the lamellar microstructure on the conformations of chiral block copolymers

Recent advances in polymer synthesis have led to the development of chiral polymer molecules with sequence-specific chirality. When incorporated into a block copolymer architecture, these systems are capable of exhibiting chirality transfer (formation of chiral conformations and chiral structures from chiral building blocks), or the thermodynamics is affected in unexpected ways. In this work, we employ particle-based simulations to study compute thermodynamic and conformational metrics to study the behavior of chiral molecules in a lamellar microstructure. Surprisingly, we find that the morphological constraints of the microstructure result in a change in the helical nature of the conformations, when compared to an isolated single chain. This suggests a tradeoff occurs, where enthalpic contacts between unlike monomers are reduced, but that an internal strain occurs in chain conformations.