Anisotropic fluctuations and stability of ordered phases in diblock copolymer systems

A review of our recent work on the stability of ordered phases in diblock copolymer systems is given. The stability is investigated and kinetic pathways of order-order transitions are explored using our novel theory of anisotropic fluctuations. The analogy between a polymer chain in periodic structures and electron in crystalline solids is discovered and exploited to obtain reciprocal space results. Anisotropic density-density correlation functions are computed for all ordered phases and used to obtain the spinodal lines in the weak segregation region of the lamellar, cylindrical and spherical phases. The most unstable fluctuation modes are idenfied. These in turn help in determining the kinetic pathways during the order-order transitions between the various phases.