1. Ordered Hybrid Polymer-Nanorod Composites for Renewable Energy
Stephen Boyes, Department of Chemistry, Colorado School of Mines
The goal of this program is to develop ordered assemblies of polymer modified metallic and semiconducting nanorods in phase separated diblock copolymer films. The initial research presents a novel and versatile method for the surface modification of metallic and semi-conducting nanorods using any thiol-terminated polymer prepared by reversible addition fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) polymerization.
During the first year of this project two major advances were made:
The first advance involves the development of a templated polymerization technique for oxidative polymerization of pyrrole or thiophene using polymer modified gold nanorods as the template.
The second advance made with in this project involves the formation of hybrid nanostructures consisting of metallic nanospheres surrounding polymer modified gold nanorods.