In 1959 Feynman said the future of engineering and science belongs to the
nanotechnology [1, 2]. After fifty-seven years it has been proved that he was completely
right. A perfect example of systems obtained in a nanometers scale, with
huge development potential is a polymer brush.
Polymer brushes consist of polymer chains tethered by one end to a commonly
solid substrate. For a sufficiently high grafting density the macromolecules are
arranged sticking out perpendicularly to the surface. Such systems could be prepared
following two main strategies: “grafting to” and “grafting from” processes by
means of various polymerization methods. The most popular ones are controlled
radical polymerizations, especially surface-initiated atom transfer radical polymerization
(SI-ATRP) [3], but brushes may also be fabricated using surface-initiated
anionic or cationic polymerization processes.
The architecture of the polymer systems could be very precisely controlled by
selection of monomers used for the polymerization, substrates, types of solvents,
temperature and duration of the whole synthesis. A postmodification of the produced
brushes is also possible [4, 5].
Both structure and composition of polymer brushes may be characterized by
means of numerous methods applied for a surface characterization including grazin-
angle infrared spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), atomic
force microscopy (AFM) or even gel permeation chromatography (GPC) [6].
Thanks to the above mentioned distinguishing properties polymer brushes
have found a lot of applications. They have been used e.g. in the construction of
modified graphene surfaces (they improved solubility, mechanical properties, thermal
stability and electrical conductivity of the material), by manipulation of cell
adhesion processes, in the column chromatography (to change quality of the stationary
phase what enabled more efficient proteins separation) etc. [4].
In this review the synthesis, characterization and applications of varied polymer
brushes are discussed.
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