Polymerized Surface Micelles Formed Under Mild Conditions

Amphiphilic molecules, including lipids, surfactants, and block copolymers, etc., are a kind of"soft materials"which have attracted increasing interests from basic researches and various applications. Up to now, the researches on amphiphilic molecules have developed from traditional colloid and interface science to many application fields such as mimicking biological membranes, catalysis, drug delivery, templating synthesis of mesoporous inorganic materials and low-dimensional functional nanomaterials. However, the knowledge on surfactant self-organization at solid/liquid interfaces is still limited and immature, including the structural characterization, morphology controlling, the stability and functionalization of surfactant aggregates at the interfaces. How to enhance the stability of surfactant self-assemblies at interfaces, especially how to stabilize surface micelles and further control their morphologies, has become a critical issue remaining unaddressed.In this thesis, we introduced a macrocyclic disulfide as a polymerizable moiety into a surfactant, and hoped that such a surfactant could give rise to a stable micellar nanostructure by ring-opening polymerization under a mild condition. We found that the ring-opening polymerization can take place inside the micelles which formed in the solution with the concentration above the CMC. And the in situ AFM investigations of the adsorption morphologies of diluted polymerized micelles solution at the liquid/mica interface suggest that the polymerized surface micelles have shown an enhanced stability over unpolymerized ones.