Recent Progress in Living Radical Polymerization

Abstract

Living radical polymerization (LRP) is a polymerization method to control molecular weight, distribution, and monomer sequence under radical conditions. Significant developments have been made to explore new LRP methods and their applications to fabricate polymer materials since the report by Georges in 1993. In this review, recent two topics related to the activation of dormant species in LRP are described. At first, use of photochemistry in the activation of dormant species is described. The new condition has several advantages including the increase of macromolecular structure and the lowering catalyst loading. Secondly, LRP of unconjugated monomers is discussed. While LRP of unconjugated monomers is more difficult than that of conjugated monomers, appropriate choice of LRP method and conditions allow the controlled homo and copolymerization of unconjugated monomers. These results clearly expand the synthetic ability of LRP for fabricating functional polymer materials.