Fabrication of Silica/Poly(3,4-ethylenedioxy thiophene) Core/Shell Nanoparticles and Their Application to Conductive Thin Films

摘要

Over the last few decades, there has been considerable attention to fabricate versatile polymer-coated core/shell nanoparticles because of their potential applications in the field of coatings, catalysis, separations, and diagnostics. Particularly nanoparticles with conducting polymer shell have been more attracted in that they play an additional role in endowing core material with electrical property. To date, various desirable methods for producing conducting polymer-enwrapped nanoparticles such as vapor deposition polymerization, layer by layer adsorption, and emulsion polymerization have been proposed. However, in most cases, there have been serious difficulties in nanometer size control, large-scale production and few aggregation. One of potential approaches has been considered as the use of nanoparticles with well-defined dimension and tunable size as the hard template, since the coating of nanoparticle with organized polymeric layer could be readily manipulated by varying the particle size in the core.