Keynote Address. Diblock copolymers under nanoconfinement

COLL 438

Qiang Wang, q.wang@colostate.edu, Department of Chemical and Biological Enigneering, Colorado State University, 1370 Campus Delivery, Fort Collins, CO 80523
Nano-confinement strongly affects and can thus be used to control the self-assembled morphology of block copolymers. The confinement dimensions, geometries and patterns of the confining surfaces, and surface preferences all have significant effects on the morphology of block copolymers under nano-confinement. Understanding these effects is of both fundamental and practical interest. In this work, we use real-space self-consistent field calculations with high accuracy to study the self-assembled morphology of diblock copolymers (DBC) in several systems, including lamellae- and cylinder-forming DBC in thin films, in nano-pores, on topologically patterned substrates, and on chemically patterned substrates. The stable phases are identified through free-energy comparisons, and our SCF results are compared with available experiments and Monte Carlo simulations. Much richer phase behaviors are found in these nano-confined systems, with complex morphologies that are very different from those found in the bulk.