Figure 2.
Spontaneous aggregation in a system consisting of A19 (4%), A1-b-S6 (13%), and S6 (3%) in a simulation system of size (40Rc)3. An initially random mixture (panel a) evolves in 5.0 × 105 steps into a spherical multicore assembly (panel d). The snapshots correspond to simulation times (a) zero, (b) 4 × 103, (c) 1.3 × 105, and (d) 5.0 × 105 steps. Panel (e) shows the cross-section of the multicore assembly formed and (f) the dependence of the average particle number and the weight average on time. The inset shows magnification of panel (f) at early times, where the different stages of evolution, I–III (stage (I) core and micelle formation, stage (II) small micelle aggregation, and stage (III) equilibration) are discussed in the text. Simulation data standard deviations after equilibration are smaller than the symbol size, and hence no error bars are explicitly presented. The polymer bead colors follow Figure 1. Solvent is omitted in the visualizations for clarity.