Abstract
Self-assembly of polymer solutions containing zirconium oxide nanoparticles in mixtures of organic solvents and water in the course of vaporization of the solvents is interesting as one of preparation methods to obtain photonic crystals. In the preceding paper, we reported that the water droplets formed by nucleation were regularly arranged and then collapsed due to aggregation and coalescence of the droplets during the vaporization. In this study we tried to fix the self-assembled structure with keeping the regularity in the following two methods; (i) freezing of the self-assembled structure due to vitrification of the polymer and (ii) fixation of structures arising from photo-crosslink due to ultra-violet (UV) irradiation. We succeeded in freezing of the regular structures in the former method, while in the latter method the regular structures were collapsed due to viscoelastic effects of phase-separated structures induced by the UV irradiation.
