Topology Effects on Polymer Properties

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue aims to provide an overview of recent advances on the properties of polymers as a function of the macromolecular architecture and topology through both original research papers and reviews.

Recent synthetic methods have allowed preparing macromolecules with different topologies and very well-defined architectures, comprising ring polymers, star polymers, comb polymers, polymer brushes, and dendrimers, to name the most common ones. The further possibility of having unlikely repeat units, thus considering random and, in particular, block copolymers, can provide an additional degree of freedom to tailor the macromolecules’ properties and tune their performance. These different architectures may lead to new and peculiar polymer properties in that they can affect both the conformational and the dynamical properties of these polymers, hence, for instance, their rheological and transport properties. Additionally, the possible functionalization of the end groups in branched polymers may increase their versatility. Accordingly, all these features may lead to smart functional materials with a large array of possible applications in many, largely unrelated nanoscience and nanotechnology fields, in particular, for instance, in nanomedicine. We thus feel that a timely collection of original papers and reviews about these systems using a variety of techniques, from the theoretical and simulation studies to the experimental ones, would be of great interest in many fields of research.

Prof. Fabio Ganazzoli
Prof. Giuseppina Raffaini
Guest Editors

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