0000000000365195
AUTHOR
Giang Thi Vu
Curvature as a Guiding Field for Patterns in Thin Block Copolymer Films
Experimental data on thin films of cylinder-forming block copolymers (BC)—free-standing BCmembranes as well as supported BC films—strongly suggest that the local orientation of the BC patternsis coupled to the geometry in which the patterns are embedded. We analyze this phenomenon using generalsymmetry considerations and numerical self-consistent field studies of curved BC films in cylindricalgeometry. The stability of the films against curvature-induced dewetting is also analyzed. In goodagreement with experiments, we find that the BC cylinders tend to align along the direction of curvature athigh curvatures. At low curvatures, we identify a transition from perpendicular to parallel alignm…
Order-Order Phase Transitions Induced by Supercritical Carbon Dioxide in Triblock Copolymer Thin Films
We study the influence of supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO2) on the phase behavior of a cylinder-forming polystyrene-block-polybutadiene-b-polystyrenetriblock copolymer thin film. Solvent annealing with scCO2 can produce patterns with long-range order but these structures become unstable for thin films with small thicknesses. These results are in good agreement with self-consistent mean field calculations, which indicate that a drying transition occurs for thicknesses below the radius of gyration of the molecule.After decompression and solvent extraction, the initially swollen polymer nanostructure suffers a strong reduction in the average domain spacing, which has a deleterious effect on…
Shear-aligned block copolymer monolayers as seeds to control the orientational order in cylinder-forming block copolymer thin films
We study the dynamics of coarsening of a cylinder-forming block copolymer thin film deposited on a prepatterned substrate made of a well-ordered block copolymer monolayer. During thermal annealing the shear-aligned bottom layer drives extinction of the disclinations and promotes a strong orientational correlation, disturbed only by dislocations and undulations along the cylinders of the minority phase. The thin film bilayer system remains stable during annealing, in agreement with self-consistent field theory results that indicate that although the thickness of a stack of two monolayers is not at the optimum thickness condition, it is very close to equilibrium. Phase field simulations indic…