Regulating the Conformational and Macroscopic Properties of Inorganic Nanowires by Polymer Grafts

Ultrathin inorganic nanowires are an emerging class of building blocks for creating functional materials and devices, but there remains challenging to fine-tune the structure and property of the nanowires at the molecular level. Here, this work shows that ultrathin polymer-grafted gold nanowires (PG-AuNWs) can exhibit bottlebrush polymer-like physical behaviors and macroscopic properties. The hybrid PG-AuNWs in solutions show polymer-like viscoelasticity which can be finely regulated by controlling the structural parameters (e.g., length of the AuNWs, molecular weight of grafted polymers) of the PG-AuNWs, the environmental conditions (e.g., temperature, solvent compositions), and the aging time. Furthermore, this work unravels at the molecular level that the conformational properties (e.g., contour length, persistence length, and mean-squared radius of gyration) of the PG-AuNWs can be correlated to their structural parameters following similar power-law relations as molecular bottlebrush polymers. This work bridges the fundamental gap between polymer-like inorganic nanowires and bottlebrush polymers, thus accelerating the development of new nanowire-based functional hybrid materials and devices. Ultrathin hybrid polymer-grafted gold nanowires (PG-AuNWs) exhibit sidechain-dependent conformational and macroscopic properties, resembling that of bottlebrush polymers. The viscoelasticity of PG-AuNWs can be finely regulated by controlling structural parameters of PG-AuNWs, solvent composition and aging time.image