Abstract Submitted for the MAR13 Meeting of The American Physical Society In-situ Grazing-incidence Small-angle X-ray Scattering Study of Diblock Copolymer Thin Films during Solvent Annealing

Submitted for the MAR13 Meeting of The American Physical Society In-situ Grazing-incidence Small-angle X-ray Scattering Study of Diblock Copolymer Thin Films during Solvent Annealing XIAODAN GU, University of Massachusetts Amherst, ILJA GUNKEL, ALEXENDER HEXEMER, Lawrence Berkeley National lab, THOMAS RUSSELL, University of Massachusetts Amherst, UNIVERSITY OFMASSACHUSETTS AMHERST COLLABORATION, LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LAB COLLABORATION — Solvent annealing emerged as a convenient means to obtain ordered structures in block copolymer thin films. The mechanism, however, by which this ordering occurs is illunderstood. Here, we performed in-situ grazing incidence small-angle scattering (GISAXS) experiments on diblock copolymers thin films during annealing in organic solvent vapors to study the underlying mechanism that underpins the self-assembly process. We used two different cylinder forming block copolymers, poly(styreneblock-ethylene oxide) (PS-b-PEO) and poly(styrene-block-2-vinylpyridine) (PS-bP2VP) that were spin-coated on silicon wafers and. The films were annealed in tetrahydrofuran (THF), which is slightly selective for the PS block. We performed in-situ scattering experiments at constant swelling of the films and also investigated the effect of deswelling at different rates of solvent removal. Our results show that the films undergo a disorder-to-order transition during swelling. Also we found that the lateral ordering of the microdomains after deswelling is highly sensitive to the rate of solvent removal. Xiaodan Gu University of Massachusetts Amherst Date submitted: 09 Nov 2012 Electronic form version 1.4