Regensburg 2016 – scientific programme

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MM: Fachverband Metall- und Materialphysik

MM 39: Biomaterials and Biopolymers I (joint session CPP/BP/MM)

MM 39.6: Talk

Wednesday, March 9, 2016, 16:45–17:00, H40

Tuning the Morphology of Langmuir Polymer Films through Controlled Relaxations of Non-Equilibrium States — •Renate Reiter, Sivasurender Chandran, and Günter Reiter — University of Freiburg, Experimental Polymer Physics, Freiburg, Germany

In general it is difficult to reproduce well defined morphologies of Langmuir polymer films (LPFs) because they have a high propensity to form non-equilibrium states. When these films are allowed to relax, a decay of the surface pressure with time might be observed indicating that the system is not equilibrated. Monitoring the temporal evolution of these relaxations and correlating them with snapshots of the corresponding morphologies sheds light on the associated structural reorganisation processes.

We present a systematic study based on different compression protocols designed to allow for relaxations of LPFs under well defined conditions. The homo peptide poly-γ-benzyl-L-glutamate (PBLG) was chosen for this study because it is a well investigated system that represents the relaxational behaviour of rod-like molecules which is expected to show less complexity than coiled polymer molecules. Our results demonstrate that experimentally manipulating the course of relaxations in LPFs has tremendous impact on the ordering of the molecules. Therefore various macroscopic properties of these biological relevant thin films are accessible.