End-Functionalized Ions Promote Stability of Highly Frustrated Phases in Diblock Copolymers (opens in new tab)

Block copolymers self-assemble into ordered nanostructures whose geometry is governed by a competition between interfacial energy and chain conformational entropy. While this competition produces a rich sequence of morphologies, topologically complex ``frustrated'' phases such as the primitive cubic ($Im\bar{3}m$) network incur severe packing penalties and are difficult to access in neutral systems. Here we show that ions functionalized at the...