Polyethylene (PE) is a polymer of great importance in our everyday life due to its unique thermal and mechanical properties. However, it suffers from lack of reactivity that prevents to introduce it into more complexed architectures the final properties of which would benefit from these unique features. The modification of end-functionalized polymers through orthogonal and efficient coupling reactions is a powerful and widely used tool for the design of various macromolecular architectures. In today’s polymer science the copper catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition (CuAAC) is the most frequently used « click » reaction. Another efficient coupling method is the hetero Diels-Alder (HDA) reaction between a diene end-functionalized polymer and the electron deficient dithioester end-group of a polymer synthesized by reversible addition fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) polymerization. Our first aim was to fin and optimize the best ethylene catalytic polymerization system that would allow to produce PE with different molar masses and end functional groups. In a second step, we tried to introduce polyethylene segments in macromolecular architectures by taking advantage of the best attributes of the aforementioned coupling reactions
