日本ゼオライト学会　刊行物 Publication of Japan Zeolite Association

Liquid crystals are a class of self-organizing materials. They spontaneously form a variety of nanostructures depending on their molecular shape, interaction, and volume balance between their polar/non-polar moieties. There has been an increasing attention on the use of liquid crystals for creating well-nanostructured polymer films. In particular, the design of liquid-crystalline monomer, their self-organization, and subsequent in situ polymerization lead to the formation of self-standing soft polymer films preserving the liquid-crystalline nanostructures. To date, we have succeeded in developing gyroid nanostructured polymer films based on this strategy. Our molecular design is to use a zwitterion as a head group of amphiphiles. An advantage of our design is that the self-organization behavior of these amphiphilic zwitterions can be widely controlled by the addition of acids. Recently, we have designed a new amphiphilic zwitterion monomer by introducing two diene groups. Through in situ polymerization of the zwitterion monomer, a gyroid nanostructured polymer film has been successfully obtained. The polymer film shows quite high ionic conductivity of 9.9×10⁻² S cm⁻¹ under water uptake conditions. The detailed nanostructure in the film has been examined by synchrotron X-ray diffraction measurements. The structure-function relationships are discussed in this article.