A communication by Dong-Po Song, Cheng Li, Nicholas S. Colella, Wanting Xie, Shengkai Li, Xuemin Lu, Samuel Gido, Jae-Hwang Lee and James J. Watkins published in JACS.

The Watkins group has reported that exceptionally large volumes of highly ordered arrays (single grains) on the order of millimeters in scale can be rapidly created through a unique innate guiding mechanism of brush block copolymers (BBCPs). The use of strong interactions between nanoparticles (NPs) and BBCPs enables the high loadings of functional materials, up to 76 wt% (46 vol%) in the target domain, while maintaining excellent long-range order.