Membranes for Cation Transport Based on Dendronized Poly(epichlorohydrin-co-ethylene oxide). Part 1: The Effect of Dendron Amount and Column Orientation on Copolymer Mobility

Dendronized polyethers give rise to columnar LC structures which can successfully act as cation transport materials. Therefore, we prepared two different materials, based on Poly(epichlorohydrin-co-ethylene oxide) (PECH-co-EO) grafted with methyl 3,4,5-tris[4-(n-dodecan-1-yloxy)benzyloxy] benzoate, containing 20% or 40% modified units, respectively. The obtained polymers were characterized by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), X-ray diffraction and optical microscopy between crossed polars (POM) and compared to the unmodified PECH-co-EO. In order to reach efficient transport properties, homeotropically oriented membranes were prepared by a fine-tuned thermal annealing treatment and were subsequently investigated by dynamic mechanical thermal analysis (DMTA) and dielectric thermal analysis (DETA). We found that the presence of the dendrons induces a main chain partial crystallization of the polyether chain and coherently increases the polymer Tg. This effect is more evident in the oriented membranes. As for copolymer orientation upon annealing, the cooling rate and the annealing temperature were the most crucial factors. DMTA and DETA confirmed that grafting with the dendron strongly hinders copolymer motions, but did not show great differences between unoriented and oriented membranes, regardless of the amount of dendrons.

Improvement on Thermal Stability of Nano-Domains in Lithium Niobate Thin Films

We present a simple and effective way to improve the thermal stability of nano-domains written with an atomic force microscope (AFM)-tip voltage in a lithium niobate film on insulator (LNOI). We show that nano-domains in LNOI (whether in the form of stripe domains or dot domains) degraded, or even disappeared, after a post-poling thermal annealing treatment at a temperature on the order of ∼100 ∘ C. We experimentally confirmed that the thermal stability of nano-domains in LNOI is greatly improved if a pre-heat treatment is carried out for LNOI before the nano-domains are written. This thermal stability improvement of nano-domains is mainly attributed to the generation of a compensating space charge field parallel to the spontaneous polarization of written nano-domains during the pre-heat treatment process.