Polymer brushes : synthesis, characterization and applications

In 1959 Feynman said the future of engineering and science belongs to the nanotechnology [1, 2]. After fifty-seven years it has been proved that he was completely right. A perfect example of systems obtained in a nanometers scale, with huge development potential is a polymer brush. Polymer brushes consist of polymer chains tethered by one end to a commonly solid substrate. For a sufficiently high grafting density the macromolecules are arranged sticking out perpendicularly to the surface. Such systems could be prepared following two main strategies: “grafting to” and “grafting from” processes by means of various polymerization methods. The most popular ones are controlled radical polymerizations, especially surface-initiated atom transfer radical polymerization (SI-ATRP) [3], but brushes may also be fabricated using surface-initiated anionic or cationic polymerization processes. The architecture of the polymer systems could be very precisely controlled by selection of monomers used for the polymerization, substrates, types of solvents, temperature and duration of the whole synthesis. A postmodification of the produced brushes is also possible [4, 5]. Both structure and composition of polymer brushes may be characterized by means of numerous methods applied for a surface characterization including grazin- angle infrared spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), atomic force microscopy (AFM) or even gel permeation chromatography (GPC) [6]. Thanks to the above mentioned distinguishing properties polymer brushes have found a lot of applications. They have been used e.g. in the construction of modified graphene surfaces (they improved solubility, mechanical properties, thermal stability and electrical conductivity of the material), by manipulation of cell adhesion processes, in the column chromatography (to change quality of the stationary phase what enabled more efficient proteins separation) etc. [4]. In this review the synthesis, characterization and applications of varied polymer brushes are discussed