1. Synthesis of silver nanoparticles in PS-b-PAA reverse micelle cores
The synthesized PS-b-PAA copolymer consists of a PS block with
105 monomer units and a PAA block with 50 monomer units. Several
solvents with different polarity, such as toluene, THF, dioxane,
DMF and diethyl ether, were tried to arrange spherical and monodisperse
reverse micelles in solution as described before [33]. The
best way to generate spherical reverse micelles was to heat the
copolymer solution at 135 C for 20 min after dissolved in toluene
[33]. The spherical PS-b-PAA micelles are seen in Fig. 1. DLS results
of micellar solution of PS-b-PAA in toluene are given in Fig. S1.