Robert W. Vaughan Lecture in Chemical Engineering

Network phases are triply periodic structures containing one or more percolating, three-dimensional paths. These materials have attracted attention in recent years as potential optical materials, where the optical properties emerge from either the chirality of the network or from plasmonic effects at the termination plane. This presentation will explore our recent computational research on routes to self-assemble network phases in block copolymers, which can serve as templates for creating metallic metamaterials. In the first part of the presentation, I will describe approaches to produce single-gyroid phases, which consist of a chiral network with three-fold connectors. While these phases are metastable in simple AB diblock copolymers, we have shown that using either blends of linear block polymers or nonlinear polymer architectures exposes stability windows for alternating gyroid and single gyroid in experimentally accessible systems. In many cases, the resulting materials need to be processed as thin films, and the selection of the termination plane impacts their optical properties. The second part of the presentation will discuss a new principle, known as boundary frustration, that guides termination plane selection between two non-preferential surfaces. Finally, I will describe a new approach known as "generative SCFT" that leverages generative adversarial networks to propose new initial guesses for subsequent SCFT calculations. This approach not only identified all known block polymer network phases, but also uncovered a vast library of candidate network phases.