Ural Federal University, Lenin av. 51, 620000 Ekaterinburg, Russia.
University of Vienna, Sensengasse 8, 1090 Vienna, Austria.
Soft Matter. 2017 Apr 5;13(14):2590-2602. doi: 10.1039/c6sm02606k.
Practical applications of polymer brush-like systems rely on a clear understanding of their internal structure. In the case of magnetic nanoparticle filament brushes, the competition between bonding and nonbonding interactions-including long range magnetic dipole-dipole interactions-makes the microstructure of these polymer brush-like systems rather complex. On the other hand, the same interactions open up the possibility to manipulate the meso- and macroscopic responses of these systems by applying external magnetic fields or by changing the background temperature. In this study, we put forward an approach to extract information about the internal structure of a magnetic filament brush from scattering experiments. Our method is based on the mapping of the scattering profiles to the information about the internal equilibrium configurations of the brushes obtained from computer simulations. We show that the structure of the magnetic filament brush is strongly anisotropic in the direction perpendicular to the grafting surface, especially at low temperatures and external fields. This makes slice-by-slice scattering measurements a technique very useful for the study of such systems.
聚合物刷状系统的实际应用依赖于对其内部结构的清晰理解。在磁性纳米纤维刷的情况下，键合和非键合相互作用（包括长程磁偶极子-偶极子相互作用）之间的竞争使得这些聚合物刷状系统的微观结构相当复杂。另一方面，相同的相互作用通过施加外磁场或改变背景温度为操纵这些系统的介观和宏观响应提供了可能性。在这项研究中，我们提出了一种从散射实验中提取有关磁性纤维刷内部结构信息的方法。我们的方法基于将散射谱映射到从计算机模拟中获得的有关刷子内部平衡构型的信息。我们表明，磁性纤维刷在垂直于接枝表面的方向上具有强烈的各向异性，尤其是在低温和外场下。这使得切片散射测量成为研究此类系统的非常有用的技术。
