CROSSOVER OF DOMAIN-GROWTH BEHAVIOR FROM PERCOLATION TO CLUSTER REGIME IN PHASE SEPARATION OF AN OFF-CRITICAL POLYMER MIXTURE

摘要

Time-resolved light scattering has been used to investigate phase-separation dynamics for off-critical mixtures of polybutadiene (PB) and polyisoprene (PI) with a well defined phase diagram. Percolation-to-cluster transition (PCT) occurs in the course of the phase separation process for an off-critical mixture of the PB and the PI in the shallow quenches covered in this work. Before the onset of PCT occurs, the phase separation dynamics is fast, typically obeying q(m) similar to t (-0.9) and I-m similar to t(2.7) (''percolation regime''), where q(m) is the scattering vector at the maximum scattered intensity I-m. After the onset of PCT the time changes in q(m) and I-m become very slow, and the phase separation process might appear to stop, if we observe the dynamics in a short time scale after the onset of PCT. The behavior corresponds to the results which Hashimoto et al. reported for the off-critical mixtures of poly(styrene-ran-butadiene) (SBR) and PB, and SBR and PI (spontaneous pinning of the domain growth) [J. Chem. Phys. 97, 679 (1992)]. However, it is shown in this paper that the droplets formed after PCT eventually grow according to the scaling law of q(m) similar to t(-n) and l(m) similar to t(3n) with n = 1/4 to 1/3 (''cluster regime''), if we keep observing the phase separation process in the much longer time scale, beyond the time period over which the domain growth appeared to be pinned. To our knowledge, it is for the first time that such crossover of domain-growth behavior from percolation to cluster regime was observed via the intermittent time period over which the grow-th kinetics are apparently pinned. (C) 1997 American Institute of Physics. [References: 48]