Self-assembly of amphiphilic homopolymers bearing ferrocene and carboxyl functionalities: effect of polymer concentration, β-cyclodextrin, and length of alkyl linker.

Three new acrylamide monomers containing ferrocene and tert-butyl ester groups were first synthesized via multistep nucleophilic substitution reaction under mild conditions followed by reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) homopolymerization to give well-defined homopolymers with narrow molecular weight distributions (M(w)/M(n) ≤ 1.36). The target amphiphilic homopolymers were obtained by the acidic hydrolysis of tert-butyoxycarbonyls to carboxyls in every repeating unit using CF3COOH. The self-assembly behaviors of these amphiphilic homopolymers bearing both ferrocene and carboxyl moieties in each repeating unit in aqueous media were investigated by transmission emission microscopy (TEM), dynamic light scattering (DLS), and atomic force microscopy (AFM). Large compound micelles with different morphologies were formed by these amphiphilic homopolymers, which consist of the corona formed by hydrophilic carboxyls and the core containing numerous reverse micelles with hydrophilic islands of carboxyls in continuous hydrophobic phase of ferrocene-based segments. The morphologies of the formed micelles could be tuned by the concentration of amphiphilic homopolymers, pH value of the solution, the length of -CH2 linker between ferrocene group and carboxyl, and the amount of β-cyclodextrin (β-CD).