Impact of Crosslinking on the Photonic Properties of Self-Assembled Bottle Brush Block Copolymers

The most vibrant and striking colors in nature are not produced by pigments but by the structural arrangement of transparent materials at scales comparable to visible light wavelength. In our research, we fabricated bottle brush block copolymer (BBCP)-based lamellar structures to achieve tunable structural colors and expand their applications in optical devices. In addition, we introduced BP based crosslinker in our system which gives us unique optical properties. Here, the project aims to utilize ultrasmall-angle X-ray scattering (USAXS) to characterize the internal lamellar domain structure and its evolution during crosslinking processes.