In the presence of selective solvents, amphiphilic block copolymers self-assemble and form different mesomorphic structures, known as mesophases, such as micellar cubic, lamellar, normal/reverse hexagonal, and bicontinuous cubic. Mesophases have been utilized in pharmaceutical and biomedical applications and as template for synthesis of mesoporous material for separation and adsorption processe...

Nanostructures generated from block copolymer self-assembly enable a variety of potential technological applications. In this article we review recent work and the current status of two major emerging applications of block copolymer (BCP) nanostructures: lithography for microelectronics and photovoltaics. We review the progress in BCP lithography in relation to the requirements of the semicondu...

In the recent years, the study of block copolymers has received special attention from polymer scientists, as it has proved to be of a great importance in a variety of fields like life-sciences, tissue engineering, drug delivery, and nanotechnology and material sciences. This has led to a thorough investigation of the “hierarchy of the block copolymer morphology” i.e. the microscopic level chan...

Simulations of five different coarse-grained models of symmetric diblock copolymers are compared to demonstrate a universal (i.e., model-independent) dependence of the free energy and order-disorder transition (ODT) on the invariant degree of polymerization N̄. The actual values of χN at the ODT approach predictions of the Fredrickson-Helfand (FH) theory for N̄ ≳ 10(4) but significantly exceed FH...

Ordered gold nanoparticle arrays with high lateral density of 6.87 × 1010 nanoparticles cm−2, which are stable up to temperatures of 600 ◦C, were fabricated. To this end, nanoparticles formed by thermal vacuum evaporation of Au were immobilized within the pores of nanoporous silicon wafers prepared by block copolymer lithography coupled with dry plasma etching. Even after high-temperature treat...

Ion complexation within cylinder-forming block copolymer thin films was found to affect the ordering process of the copolymer films during solvent annealing, significantly enhancing the long-range positional order. Small amounts of alkali halide or metal salts were added to PS-b-PEO, on the order of a few ions per chain, where the salt complexed with the PEO block. The orientation of the cylind...

We perform molecular simulations to study the self-assembly of block copolymer tethered cubic nanoparticles. Minimal models of the tethered nanoscale building blocks (NBBs) are utilized to explore the structures arising from self-assembly. We demonstrate that attaching a rigid nanocube to a diblock copolymer affects the typical equilibrium morphologies exhibited by the pure copolymer. Lamellar ...

Using both theory and experiment, we investigate the possibility of creating perfectly ordered block copolymer nanostructures on sparsely patterned substrates. Our study focuses on scrutinizing the appropriate pattern conditions to avoid undesired morphologies or defects when depositing cylinder-forming AB diblock copolymer thin films on the substrates which are mostly neutral with periodic str...

For the promise of self-assembly to be realized, processing techniques must be developed that simultaneously enable control of the nanoscale morphology, rapid assembly, and, ideally, the ability to pattern the nanostructure. Here, we demonstrate how photothermal gradients can be used to control the ordering of block copolymer thin films. Highly localized laser heating leads to intense thermal g...

Self-assembly of block copolymer films can generate useful periodic nanopatterns, but the self-assembly needs to be templated to impose long-range order and to control pattern registration with other substrate features. We demonstrate here the fabrication of aligned sub-10-nm line width patterns with a controlled orientation by using lithographically formed post arrays as templates for a 16 kg/...