Amphiphilic Dynamic Block Copolymers - toward the development of multi-responsive combinatorial mesophases – DYNABLOCKs

The DYNABLOCKs project is part of a bundle of explorations to implement Dynamic Combinatorial Chemistry in the field of material science. Here, we propose to focus our work on libraries of a firm new kind of objects, namely dynamic self-assembled amphiphilic block copolymers that display a tunable and reversible selectivity of the molecular connections between their blocks. We wish to investigate their potential abilities for the expression of various combinatorial mesophases as a function of environmental parameters and time. In practice, the DYNABLOCKs project will bring together a team of chemists, a team of theorists, and teams of soft-matter physico-chemists so as to function in a real-time feedback-loop between the conception of supramolecular libraries and their resulting behaviour as potential materials. Indeed, all structural and dynamical features will be collected using expert analyses of data from DOSY NMR spectroscopy, microscopies, and scattering experiments (light, neutron and X-ray), in order to determine the most pertinent thermodynamic and kinetic frameworks of these multi-responsive systems.