Journal
PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS
Volume 121, Issue 20, Pages -Publisher
AMER PHYSICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.207802
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Funding
- American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund [59434-ND6]
- China Scholarship Council [201606280242]
- National Natural Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars of China (NSFC) [51525604]
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We have discovered unusual behavior of polymer coils in a binary solvent (nitroethane thorn isooctane) near the critical temperature of demixing. The exceptionally close refractive indices of the solvent components make the critical opalescence relatively weak, thus enabling us to simultaneously observe the Brownian motion of the polymer coils and the diverging correlation length of the critical fluctuations. The polymer coils exhibit a collapse-reswelling-expansion-reshrinking transition upon approaching the critical temperature. While the first stage (collapse) can be explained by the theory of Brochard and de Gennes, the subsequent expansion-reshrinking transition is a new unexpected phenomenon that has not been observed so far. We believe that this effect is generic and attribute it to microphase separation of the solvent inside the polymer coil.
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