Polymer chemistry articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Materials capable of colour changes in response to stimuli are useful in sensors and other applications. Here the authors show a conjugated polymer that rapidly responds to the presence of water, and use it as a sensor to map active sweat pores as a means of fingerprint analysis.

    • Joosub Lee
    • , Minkyeong Pyo
    •  & Jong-Man Kim

  • Article |

    A wide diversity of surfaces patterned with microfibres is highly desirable for various applications as electrode materials. Demortière et al.develop a facile approach of producing polymer microfibres with controlled architectures via dynamic self-assembly under an alternating electric field.

    • Arnaud Demortière
    • , Alexey Snezhko
    •  & Igor S. Aranson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Conjugated microporous polymers are highly flexible materials that may be used for gas storage and catalysis applications. Here, the authors report metal-functionalized conjugated microporous polymers capable of both capturing CO2and functioning as a heterogeneous catalyst in its conversion to propylene carbonate.

    • Yong Xie
    • , Ting-Ting Wang
    •  & Wei-Qiao Deng

  • Article |

    Hyperbranched polymers have desirable properties as novel materials, and may be synthesized from homopolymerization of multi-vinyl momomers, although this can form insoluble products at low conversions. Here, the authors produce hyperbranched polymers in high yield owing to a kinetic control mechanism.

    • Tianyu Zhao
    • , Yu Zheng
    •  & Wenxin Wang

  • Article |

    Bullet-proof materials made of nanostructured composites outperform conventional materials, yet little is known of their nanoscale response to high-speed impact. Using laser-propelled microscopic projectiles, Lee et al.directly visualize this process in layered nanocomposites.

    • Jae-Hwang Lee
    • , David Veysset
    •  & Edwin L. Thomas

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Copolymers prepared by controlled radical chain-growth polymerizations usually contain ill-defined monomer sequences. Here, successive feeds of donor and acceptor comonomers are used to control the primary structure of the synthesized copolymers with very high accuracy.

    • Mirela Zamfir
    •  & Jean-François Lutz

  • Article |

    Well-defined, monodisperse colloids of semiconducting polymers are required as new photonic and optoelectronic materials. Here, a Suzuki–Miyaura dispersion polymerization is used to produce monodisperse sub-micrometer particles of a range of semiconducting polymers.

    • Alexander J.C. Kuehne
    • , Malte C. Gather
    •  & Joris Sprakel

  • Review Article |

    Quantum-mechanical tunnelling currents across nanometre-scale gaps between electrodes are sensitive to the medium in the gap. Albrecht reviews progress towards using tunnelling currents to probe single-molecule processes, and in biosensor and sequencing applications.

    • T. Albrecht

  • Article |

    Tuning the properties of responsive materials by applying an external stimulus could lead to their application as chemical switches or molecular sensors. Coronadoet al. develop a non-porous one-dimensional coordination polymer, the magnetic properties of which undergo drastic changes on chemisorption of gaseous HCl.

    • Eugenio Coronado
    • , Mónica Giménez-Marqués
    •  & Lee Brammer

  • Article |

    Conjugated polymers are promising materials for organic photovoltaic solar cells. By usingin situgrazing incidence wide-angle X-ray diffraction, Ocko and collaborators report the formation of a new type of crystalline arrangement in a conjugated polymer material known as PCDTBT.

    • Xinhui Lu
    • , Htay Hlaing
    •  & Benjamin M. Ocko

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding the thermal transitions of confined polymers is important for the design of molecular scale devices. In this study, unusual thermal transitions are observed in polyethylene glycol chains incorporated in nanochannels of porous coordination polymers.

    • Takashi Uemura
    • , Nobuhiro Yanai
    •  & Susumu Kitagawa

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