Journal article
The fuzzy sphere morphology is responsible for the increase in light scattering during the shrinkage of thermoresponsive microgels
E Ponomareva, B Tadgell, M Hildebrandt, M Krüsmann, S Prévost, P Mulvaney, M Karg
Soft Matter | ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY | Published : 2022
DOI: 10.1039/d1sm01473k
Abstract
Thermoresponsive microgels undergo a volume phase transition from a swollen state under good solvent conditions to a collapsed state under poor solvent conditions. The most prominent examples of such responsive systems are based on poly-(N-isopropylacrylamide). When cross-linked with N,N′-methylenebisacrylamide, such microgels typically possess a fuzzy-spherelike morphology with a higher cross-linked core and a loosely cross-linked fuzzy shell. Despite the efforts devoted to understanding the internal structure of microgels and their kinetics during collapse/swelling, the origins of the accompanying changes in light scattering intensity have barely been addressed. In this work, we study core..
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Grants
Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the Melbourne Advanced Microscopy Facility (Bio 21, The University of Melbourne) for access to electron microscopes and Heyou Zhang from the University of Melbourne for his support with the TEM measurements. The authors thank the Institut Laue-Langevin for allocation of SANS beamtime on D11 via EASY access; data are available on demand (DOI: 10.5291/ILL-DATA.EASY-632). The authors are also grateful for financial support from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) through its Thematic Network Melbourne-Bayreuth Polymer/Colloid Network, sponsored from funds of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The authors thank the Center for Structural Studies (CSS) that is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG Grant numbers 417919780 and INST 208/761-1 FUGG) for access to the SAXS instrument. P. M. thanks the ARC for support through Grant CE170100026. M. K. acknowledges the German Research Foundation (DFG) for funding under grant KA3880/6-1. The authors thank Gary Bryant (RMIT, Melbourne, Australia) for valuable discussions.