Diethyldithiocarbamate-mediated living radical polymerization and development for architecture of nanostructured polymers

We demonstrated that density functional theory calculations provide a reliable and quantitative prediction of the trends in C-S bond-dissociation energies for several model compounds as photoinitiator. On the basis of this information, we designed various types of diethyldithiocarbamate (DC) compounds as photoinitiators to polymerize hydrophobic and hydrophilic vinyl monomers with living radical mechanisms. These systems could be applied to the architecture of nanostructured polymers such as block, graft, star, star-block, hyperbranched and nanocylindrical polymers. In this review, we mention recent studies concerning DC-mediated living radical polymerization and architecture of nanostructured polymers.