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. 2020 Sep 17;11:4690. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-18460-2

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© The Author(s) 2020

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 9 — The dashed lines represent the situation where the relaxation time is short compared to the polymerization time. Consequently, with each monomer addition, the growing block copolymer relaxes to a lower energy configuration. The result is that the reaction proceeds downhill and finishes when the polymerization terminates. The solid line represents the situation where the polymerization time is much shorter than the relaxation time. Consequently, with each monomer addition, the growing block copolymer cannot fully relax to a lower energy configuration. The result is that the reaction initially proceeds uphill (Stage 1) and then relaxes post polymerization (Stage 2). In Stage 2, the energy barriers represent morphological transitions (e.g., spheres to rods or rods to lamellae).