Polymer chemists/polymer physicists: A constructive partnership

摘要

Ideally, polymer physicists would like to work with well-defined polymeric materials having the highest possible molecular, compositional and structural homogeneity. Such model materials provide the opportunity to better explore structure-property relationships, to test theoretical concepts or to develop new ones. Over recent decades, polymer chemists have made important advances in the synthesis of model polymeric materials with different macromolecular architectures. The availability of such materials has facilitated studies in many fields of polymer physics such as polymer rheology and dynamics, adsorption of polymers on surfaces, block copolymers' self-assembly in selective solvents, in bulk, or on surfaces, etc. I remember a great physicist, who shall remain nameless, saying that "many experimental polymer physicists owe their career to polymer chemists".