Dynamics of Polydots: Soft Luminescent Polymeric Nanoparticles

Sabina Maskey, Naresh C. Osti, Gary S. Grest, Dvora Perahia

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

The conformation and dynamics of luminescent polymers collapsed into nanoparticles or polydots were studied using fully atomistic molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, providing a first insight into their internal dynamics. Controlling the conformation and dynamics of confined polymers is essential for realization of the full potential of polydots in nanomedicine and biotechnology. Specifically, the shape and internal dynamics of polydots that consist of highly rigid dialkyl p-phenylene ethynylene (PPE) are probed as a function of temperature. At room temperature, the polydots are spherical without any correlations between the aromatic rings on the PPE backbone. With increasing temperature, they expand and become slightly aspherical; however, the polymers remain confined. The coherent dynamic structure factor reveals that the internal motion of the polymer backbone is arrested, and the side chains dominate the internal dynamics of the polydots. These new soft nanoparticles retain their overall shape and dynamics over an extended temperature range, and their conformation is tunable via their degree of expansion.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)2399-2407
Number of pages9
JournalMacromolecules
Volume49
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 22 2016

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from NSF Grant CHE 1308298. This work was made possible by advanced computational resources deployed and maintained by Clemson Computing and Information Technology. This research used resources obtained through the Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract DEAC02-05CH11231.

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