Polyelectrolyte Cylindrical Brushes in Hairy Gels.

We considered dispersions of cylindrical polyelectrolyte (PE) brushes with stiff backbones, and polymer-decorated nanorods with tunable solubility of the brush-forming PE chains that affected thermodynamic stability of the dispersions. We focused on thermo-induced and deionization-induced conformational transition that provokes loss of aggregative dispersion stability of nanorods decorated with weakly ionized polyions. A comparison between theoretical predictions and experiments enabled rationalization and semi-quantitative interpretation of the experimental results.