Thompson, Russell B.Rasmussen, KimManiadis, PanagiotisKober, Edward M.2016-03-082016-03-082009-02-271422-0067http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijms10030805http://hdl.handle.net/10012/10309Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2009, 10(3), 805-816; doi:10.3390/ijms10030805 Published by MDPI © 2009 by the authors; licensee Molecular Diversity Preservation International, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Self-consistent field theory is used to study the self-assembly of a triblock copolymer melt. Two different external factors (temperature and solvent) are shown to affect the self-assembly. Either one or two-step self-assembly can be found as a function of temperature in the case of a neat triblock melt, or as a function of increasing solvent content (for non-selective solvents) in the case of a triblock-solvent mixture. For selective solvents, it is shown that increasing the solvent content leads to more complicated self-assembly mechanisms, including a reversed transition where order is found to increase instead of decreasing as expected, and re-entrant behavior where order is found to increase at first, and then decrease to a previous state of disorder.enAttribution 4.0 InternationalTriblock copolymersself-assemblyself-consistent field theoryArticle