End-Group Chemistry and Junction Chemistry in Polymer Science: Past, Present, and Future

The current goal in functional polymeric material research is the preparation of polymers with high-fidelity nanoscale self-assembled structures and advanced functionality. Thus, recent research efforts have focused on linking chemistry for the development of tailor-made polymers with desired properties. The design of alpha- or omega-functionalized telechelic polymers with strongly associative interactions is connected to their unique supramolecular self-assembly behavior in homopolymers and blends. In addition, the end-group modification of block copolymers has shown to alter the polymer morphology radically, resulting in unprecedented property changes arising from confinement effects. This is fascinating because the content of terminal moieties is small compared to that of macromolecular polymer backbones. As an emerging theme in polymer designs and end-group chemistry, the controlled synthesis of polymers with complex architectures and functional linkages has been performed extensively in the past few decades. However, the effects of this linkage on the resultant polymer properties remain elusive and thus will be an important research topic in polymer science in the near future.