Bottle-brush polymers as an intermediate between star and cylindrical polymers.
We present a theoretical study of a single bottle-brush molecule, which consists of multiarmed polymer stars grafted densely onto a stiff backbone. Mean-field approximation and a variational approach are used to calculate the dominant trajectories of the grafted chains, the shape of the molecule, and the segment density distribution around the backbone. All these properties are calculated for an arbitrary relationship between the size of the backbone and that of a grafted star. Hence cylindrical comb copolymer brushes and spherically symmetric polymer stars are considered as the limiting cases of the present problem.
Denesyuk
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Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, Lensfield Road, Cambridge CB2 1EW, United Kingdom. nad28@cam.ac.uk