Interest in thiol click chemistry continues to grow as more uses for the simple synthetic platform are explored. Recently we reported the fabrication of nanocomposites containing gold and silver nanospheres using photoinitiated thiol-ene and thiol-yne chemistry. The resulting films and fibers exhibited unique optical and mechanical (e.g. Young's modulus, glass transition temperature) properties that could be tuned based on the type of brush ligand used to functionalize the nanoparticles that they contained, or by the concentration of nanoparticles that were within the polymer. The possibility of using thiol click nanocomposites as unique surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) conduits was also explored yielding promising results. The value of fabricating high-performance nanocomposites spans numerous research areas including surface chemistry, smart textiles, optically active materials and sensors. The ease with which such materials can be fabricated using thiol click chemistry makes this work of great value to the polymer science community.

Fabrication and optical properties of novel thiol click nanocomposite polymers

248th National Meeting (2014)

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