On the order-disorder transition of compressible diblock copolymer melts

We performed both the fast off-lattice Monte Carlo simulations of symmetric diblock copolymers (DBC) in an isothermal-isobaric ensemble and the self-consistent field calculations of asymmetric DBC to properly determine the order-disorder transition (ODT) of a model system of compressible DBC melts used in the literature when it is a first-order phase transition, and studied for the first time the co-existence of the two phases at ODT. We found that the co-existing region is quite small and decreases as the system becomes less compressible, which justifies the previous ODT results obtained by equating the Helmholtz free energy per chain of the two phases. We also found that for the most compressible system where there is no repulsion between the same type of segments, the self-consistent field theory predicts that ODT is a second-order phase transition even for asymmetric DBC melts due to its mean-field approximation. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.