Building stimuli-responsive materials have created tremendous interest due to their applications in different fields like drug delivery and therapeutics, bioimaging, energy storage, to mention a few. Polymer Grafted nanoparticles act as versatile building blocks for creating tunable and functional particle superstructures with significant real-world applications. Grafting charged polymers onto nanoparticles provides us with an opportunity to use electrostatics to control and tune the self-assembly because these self-assembled structures are thermo-responsive to external stimuli such as Ionic strength, salt concentration, temperature, pH. A wide array of parameters implicit to the system like chain length, graft density, chain stiffness, charge density also plays a significant role in stimuli response. In the present work, we have used Molecular Dynamics simulations to understand the role of chain flexibility, grafting density on the self-assembly of nanoparticles in an implicit solvent. We established the phase diagrams to predict different self-assembled superstructures obtained at different grafting densities and chain lengths. The results obtained show that these polymer grafted nanoparticles form a wide range of superstructures, including rings, strings, aggregates, sheets, and lattice, by changing external stimuli' values.

Building hierarchical structures through charge driven self-assembly of polymer grafted nanoparticles

ACS Fall 2021

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