Insights from polymer crystallization: Chirality, recognition and competition

Crystallization of flexible polymer chains reveals distinct characters compared to small molecules, which provides a platform to study molecular self-assembly and morphogenesis. In this review, some examples, e.g., twisting chirality of polymer lamellar crystals, recognition of different chain units and competitive nucleation of different polymorphs and different lamellar thicknesses are briefly discussed. It is shown that the polymer crystallization process far from equilibrium is in practically minimization of the system free energy in local space and finite time, leading to formation of twisted crystals, metastable polymorphism and lamellar crystals with finite thickness. Though each molecule is blind to others, the peculiar ordered configurations with stronger long-range interactions are chosen from the enormous random trials. At the end, we list some remaining questions and outlook the perspectives.