On the Manipulation of Nanoscale Self-Assembly by Elastic Field

Morphological and compositional self-assembly can be manipulated by the long-range elastic field. This paper gives a universal formulation that determines the dependence of energetically favored orientation of those self-assembled structures on the elastic interaction. Elasticity anisotropy can lead to symmetry breaking and herringbone structures. A layered substrate can tune the feature size by modulus mismatch, or tune the orientation if the layers have different orientation preference, or guide the self-assembly by embedded structures. A closed-form result is derived for elastically isotropic layers by using Dundurs parameters. The self-assembled structures can also be affected by a nonuniform residual stress field or external force field. Higher order (nonlinear) perturbation theory, coupling between morphology and composition, and other issues are also addressed in the discussion.