Confinement Effects in Polymer Crystal Nucleation from the Bulk to Few-Chain Systems

We have studied crystallization in poly(ethylene oxide) droplets with volumes ranging over several orders of magnitude. In all samples, homogeneous nucleation is observed, scaling with the volume of the droplet, down to systems with as few as approximately 10 polymer chains. Surprisingly, nucleation is unaffected by the high degree of confinement, despite a large surface-to-volume ratio and the restriction of chains to length scales much …