Designing and tailoring material surfaces is a critical exercise as the vast majority of interactions between materials and their surroundings are governed by their surfaces. One approach to modify the surface properties of substrates involves covalently tethering polymer chains onto the surface, commonly refer to as polymer brushes. The surface functionalisation can either be achieved by “grafting-to” or “grafting-from” approach. Relying on o-methylbenzaldehyde (o-MBA) and tetrazole photoligations techniques (photochemical “grafting-to”), our group introduced a comprehensive methodology to map the reactivity of photochemical systems on surfaces and demonstrated that photochemically induced surface ligation reactions give access to wavelength selective control over grafting densities. However, once a polymer brush has been formed on an interface, it is challenging to adjust its conformation. We developed a strategy to control conformational changes in grafted polymer brushes (“grafting-from”) via photoinduced crosslinking of photoreactive groups embedded into the lateral architecture of poly(methylmethacrylate)-based polymer brush. The light-gated conformation changes were comprehensively analysed through a full suite of surface sensitive characterisation methods including time of flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (ToF-SIMS), quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring (QCM-D), UV/Vis spectroscopy, atomic force microscopy (AFM), nano-plasmonic sensing (NPS) and neutron reflectometry (NR).

Photochemical polymer brush design

ACS Spring 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.