Directional attraction between colloidal building blocks with orthogonal repulsion to the attraction can produce a chain-like supracolloidal assembly. The strategy of balancing attraction and repulsion to guide a linear assembly can apply to patchy nanoparticles of copolymer micelles. We recently demonstrated the fabrication of supracolloidal chains of patchy micelles of diblock copolymers with adjustment of solvent polarity. In addition, we also produced fluorescent supracolloidal chains functionalized with quantum dots by applying the same protocol to diblock copolymer micelles containing quantum dots. In this presentation, we demonstrate fluorescent supracolloidal chains of diblock copolymer micelles by incorporating organic fluorescent dyes selectively into the micellar cores. We first synthesized red-, green-, and blue-emitting organic fluorophores having the functional group that can be coordinated to the core-forming block of diblock copolymers. Then, we induced patchy micelles with fluorophores and polymerized them to fluorescent supracolloidal chains by adjusting the solvent polarity. Furthermore, we were able to tune the emission colors from fluorescent supracolloidal chains by combining patchy micelles having different fluorophores.

Fluorescent supracolloidal chains of diblock copolymer micelles with color tunability

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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