Photonic crystals obtained by soap-free emulsion terpolymerization

This paper presents the use of soap-free emulsion terpolymerization to obtainphotonic crystals (PCs). Monodisperse latexes resulted from the polymerization of styrene (ST) with 2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate (HEMA) and acrylic acid (AA) at different compositions defined as system A, B and C respectively. The water solubility of the macroradicals determined different nucleation mechanisms in all three cases. The micellar nucleation mechanism was more predominant for generating system A, whereas the homogeneous nucleation was specific for system C. For system B, both nucleation mechanisms werepossible with the same probability. The latexes and the resulted PCs were characterized by optical microscopy (OM), dynamic light scattering (DLS), gel permeation chromatography (GPC) and UV-VIS spectroscopy.