Block Copolymers, Polymer Brushes and Nanopatterns

초록

Polymer brushes are comprised of polymer chains tethered to the substrate via a terminal group, and are used in a diverse range of applications which require permanent surface modification. Brushes are typically formed by either “grafting-to” or “grafting-from” methods such as thermally promoted terminal hydroxyl grafting or surface-initiated polymerization. In this talk, we describe a highly versatile universal “grafting-from” approach to grow polymer brushes from a variety of substrates with high grafting density by using a single component random copolymer, which contains crosslinkable units to form a stable film and initiator units for surface-initiated atom transfer radical polymerization (SI-ATRP). The chemistry of the coating was further modified to implement a bottom-up approach to fabricate nanopatterned polymer brushes. By assembling a block copolymer on top of the coating, nanopatterned brushes were grown after selective removal of one domain from block copolymer template. The ease of synthesis, chemical tunability, homogeneous surface, chemical stability and applicability to a wide range of substrates makes this a versatile approach to create functionalized interfaces.