Controlling the location of thermally stable au nanoparticles with tailored surface property within block copolymer templates

Organic/inorganic hybrid materials have a lot of interest in various areas due to their fascinating properties. To control the location and dispersion of inorganic nanoparticles within polymer matrix, thiolterminated polymeric ligands have been widely used to tune the surface property of nanoparticles. However, the specific binding between the thiol functional group and metal is unstable with increasing temperature. To archive the thermally-stable Au nanoparticles, we previously synthesized various UV-crosslinkable polymeric ligands, which have different compositions of polar, UV-crosslinkable azide unit comparing to non-polar units. After crosslinking the Au nanoparticles, it was found that the nanoparticles had superb stability at high temperature (above 180 °C). In this work, we used thermally-stable Au nanoparticles to control the location within the polymer matrix. By changing the amount of polar azide units in the polymeric ligands, we could precisely control the location of nanoparticles from one domain to the interface of block copolymer templates.