An advance in the theory of strongly segregated polymers

The strong segregation theory (SST) of block-copolymers/polymer brushes is extended by incorporating a new leading correction to the asymptotic (chi N --> infinity) limit. In particular we found an additional feature of the b rush structure: a proximal layer of thickness FL where the molecular potent ial is essentially non-parabolic; mu proportional to root L in the case of block-copolymer microdomains where L is the domain size. The effect of the edge (interpenetration) layer is also quantified. The novel theory accounts for the recently reported discrepancies between the SST results and the nu merical SCFT predictions.