Trends in Sequence-Defined Polyelectrolyte Systems: A Perspective

Polyelectrolytes (PEs) are polymers carrying ionizable groups along the chain backbone and play an important role in life and environmental sciences, industrial applications and other fields. Due to the complicated topological structure and electrostatic correlations of PEs, PEs exhibit very rich phase behavior and morphologies in both bulk and confined solutions. So far, many theories, simulations and machine learning approaches have been proposed to study the behavior of polyelectrolyte solutions, especially the intrinsic structure-property relationships. In this perspective, from a personal point of view, we present several recent trends in polyelectrolyte solutions. The main themes considered here are accelerated development of sequence-defined polyelectrolyte (SDPE) via artificial intelligence technology, liquid-liquid phase separation in bulk SDPE solutions, adsorption behaviors of SDPE in the vicinity of a single dielectric surface, and surface forces between two charged surfaces mediated by SDPE solutions.