Technologies today and many prospective technologies demand materials that can function with precision over short length scales. How does one design such materials? One place to look for inspiration is nature. This is because over millenia of evolution, nature has converged on very clever strategies to design and synthesize materials that function with precision. Nature often seems to exploit self-assembly of macromolecules to create functionally interesting motifs. Thus, a worthwhile goal is to study how macromolecular sequence and architecture can be manipulated such that synthetic polymers can self-assemble into specific nano and microstructures that can function with precision. In this talk, I will describe some work along these lines. Specifically, the thermodynamic and dynamic behavior of disordered heteropolymers will be discussed. These are copolymers with aperiodic sequences and different architectures. We shall describe strategies that enable this class of polymers to exhibit biomometic behavior in solution and near interfaces. The discussion will include results from theoretical work, computer simulations, and synergistic experiments.
展开▼
