Institute for Medicine and Engineering Papers
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of this Version
November 2003
Abstract
Vesicles self-assembled from amphiphilic diblock copolymers exhibit a wide diversity of behavior upon poration, due to competitions between edge, surface and bending energies, while viscous dissipation mechanisms determine the time scales. The copolymers are essentially chemically identical, only varying in chain length (related to the membrane thickness d). For small d, we find large unstable pores and the resulting membrane fragments reassemble into vesicles within minutes. For large d, however, submicron pores form and are extremely long-lived. The results show that pore behavior depends strongly on d, suggesting that the relevant energies depend on d and pore size r in a more complexmanner than what is generally assumed. Further control over these systems would make them useful for numerous applications.
Date Posted: 27 July 2007
This document has been peer reviewed.
Comments
Reprinted from Europhysics Letters, Volume 64, Issue 4, November 2003, pages 550-556.
Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1209/epl/i2003-00264-2