Polymer-inorganic nanocomposite materials

The thesis describes the efforts of development new approaches to polymer-inorganic nanocomposite materials. Our intention was to synthesize and fabricate materials that may combine the advantages of polymers and inorganic nanoparticles. The results of my work can be summarized as four different approaches to hybrid materials, according to their structures and synthetic methods used.;Chapter 1 reviews recent developments in material chemistry, with emphasis on the synthesis of inorganic nanoparticles.;Chapter 2 describes the materials and methods involved in this work. In particular, the experimental setups and the principles of several experiments are given, e.g., measurements of nonlinear optical properties using Z-scan technique, measurements of magnetic properties using the SQUID technique, optical properties of colloidal crystals and an experiment setup for the study. This chapter also involves a brief introduction to light scattering techniques and X-ray diffraction techniques.;The experimental work is described in Chapter 3 and following chapters. In Chapter 3, I described the method for synthesis of nanoparticles on polymer spheres. Due to the presence of carboxyl group on the surface of latex particles, the metal ions were adsorbed to the polymer surface and converted into nanoparticles "in-situ". The hybrid particles can be self-assembled into colloidal crystals. Photo emission of the nanoparticles was suppressed by the band gap arising from the periodical dielectric structure of colloidal crystals.;Chapter 4 describes the synthesis of inorganic nanoparticles in the interior of polymer microgels. Microgel particles have a network interior structure thus they are ideal templates for synthesis of inorganic nanoparticles.;In Chapter 5, we further extended this strategy to the synthesis of gold nanoparticles whose precursors generally exist as anions (AuCl4-) in solution. The metal ions therefore can be adsorbed onto positively charged polymer particles.;Chapter 6 reports the formation of hybrid particles by electrostatic attraction between the preformed polymer particles and nanoparticles. CdTe nanoparticles were adsorbed onto the oppositely charged polymer spheres.;In Chapter 7, we describe a method used for the transfer of water soluble inorganic nanoparticles into a non-polar polymer matrix. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...