POLYMERS Vol.58　No.1 January 2009
POLYMERS　Vol.58　No.1
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Future Polymer Science and Scientific Societies
Polymer Science and I: A Personal Account
Against All Odds Emiko MOURI
<Abstract>I had spent my adolescent years rebelling. I then dared to obtain a doctoral degree without substantial achievement in the master course. I struggled with the theme “studies on nanostructure of ionic amphiphilic diblock copolymer monolayer at the air-water interface by X-ray and neutron reflectometry” and, to my pleasure, I unexpectedly found “carpet layers” in ionic polymer monolayer.
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Front-Line Polymer Science
Dynamics in Miscible Polymer Blends Hiroshi WATANABE
<Abstract>Miscible polymer blends still have a heterogeneity in their component chain concentrations in the segmental length scale because of the chain connectivity (that results in the self-concentration of the segments of respective chains) as well as the dynamic fluctuation over various length scales. As a result, the blend components encounter different dynamic environments to exhibit different temperature dependencies in their segmental relaxation rates. This type of dynamic heterogeneity often results in a broad glass transition (sometimes seen as two separate transitions), a broad distribution of the local (segmental) relaxation modes, and the thermo-rheological complexity of this distribution. Furthermore, the dynamic heterogeneity also affects the global dynamics in the miscible blends if the component chains therein have a large dynamic asymmetry. Thus, the superficially simple miscible blends offer a rich research field of polymer dynamics.
<Keywords> Miscible Polymer Blends / Dynamic Heterogeneity / Local and Global Relaxation / Thermo-rheological Complexity
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Recent Development in Structural Determination of Synthetic Helical Polymers Kanji NAGAI and Eiji YASHIMA*
<Abstract>Since the discovery of the double helix DNA and the α-helix in protein, remarkable progress in developing synthetic polymers that adopt a helical conformation has been attained. Although numerous synthetic helical polymers have been reported, the exact structures of most synthetic helical polymers remain obscure. Therefore, the development of a reliable method for unambiguously determining the helical structure is important and an urgent challenge in this area. In this article, the recent development in structural determination of artificial helical polymers including their helical pitch and handedness by means of X-ray diffraction and spectroscopic measurements together with high-resolution atomic force microscopy is described.
<Keywords>Helical Polymer / Helical Structure / Liquid Crystal / X-ray Diffraction / Atomic Force Microscopy
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