2.9 Nanohelices in block copolymers, calculation of TEM images

Block copoylymers generated from poly l-lactide and polystyrene are able to form curious helical structures with spacings and helix pitches around typically 50 nm, see the tem image figure 11(a), which are quite unusual chiral structures on a nanometer scale. An analytical technique to calculate density projections for these and similar structures (including all those in figure 1) for arbitrary microtome slice thickness, orientation and translation is being developed, see figure 11(b) for a preliminary result which led to some surprises with respect to the actual slice direction of the samples. Oriented saxs patterns, figure 11(c), indicate highly ordered structures [56].


tem.       (b) Calculated tem.   (c) Nanohelix  saxs.  (d) Calculated saxs.  (e) Nanohelix model.
PIC
(f) Proj. dir. dependence.

Figure 11: plla-b-ps block copolymer nanohelices: (a) transmission electron micrograph (tem); (b) calculated tem image; (c) saxs of an oriented film; (d) calculated saxs pattern with proper treatment of preferred orientation; (e) 3d structure model of hexagoanlly packed nanohelices; (f) direction dependence of calculated slice projection, arrow points in the helix axes direction.