A Monte Carlo study of shells of hydrophobically modified amphiphilic copolymer micelles in polar solvents

摘要

Multimolecular micelles in polar solvents formed by polystyrene-block-poly(methacrylic acid) (PS-PMA), hydrophobically modified by a nahthalene tag between blocks and an anthracene tag at the end of PMA block, are studied by a lattice Monte Carlo method. The model is parameterized according to available experimental data and several structural characteristics of the PMA shell together with the fluorometric decay functions are calculated and compared with results obtained for system without anthracene tags. The hydrophobic tags at the ends of shell-forming blocks try to avoid the polar medium and bury in the shell forcing the chains to loop back. The resulting distribution of traps is bimodal with a smaller peak in the vicinity of the core and a larger one farther from the core than the maximum on the distribution of segments.