As a new and exciting field of interdisciplinary macromolecular science and engineering, polymeric materials will have a profound presence in 21st century chemical, pharmaceutical, biomedical, manufacturing, infrastructure, electronic, optical and information technologies. The origin of this field derived from an area of polymer science and engineering encompassing plastic technologies. The field is rapidly expanding to incorporate new interdisciplinary research areas such as biomaterials, macromolecular biology, novel macromolecular structures, environmental macromolecular science and...

A classical metastable state possesses a local free energy minimum at infinite sizes, but not a global one. This concept is phase size independent. We have studied a number of experimental results and proposed a new concept that there exists a wide range of metastable states in polymers on different length scales where their metastability is critically determined by the phase size and dimensionality. Metastable states are also observed in phase transformations that are kinetically impeded on the pathway to thermodynamic equilibrium. This was illustrated in structural and morphological...