Mechanical hole burning spectroscopy in the vicinity of the ODT for an SIS block copolymer

We describe results for experiments in which a novel rheological technique is applied to a styrene-isoprene-styrene triblock copolymer in the vicinity of the order-disorder transition. Mechanical Hole Burning Spectroscopy (MSHB) was developed to probe dynamic heterogeneity in polymers. In this technique, a large amplitude oscillatory strain (LAOS) is imposed on a sample as a perturbation, and is followed by a small step strain. The relaxation response is then compared with that without the LAOS perturbation. It has been assumed that mechanical holes for heterogeneous systems. For homogeneous systems no hole would result. Here the heterogeneity of a tri-block copolymer was investigated in the vicinity of its order-disorder transition and it was found that the mechanical hole intensity gradually decreases as the phase boundary is approached from the ordered regime. At the one-phase or the disordered region, no apparent holes were observed.