Wetting-Dewetting Transition Line in Thin Polystyrene Films

Published

September 9, 2005

Author(s)

H Raghavan, K M. Ashley, A Seghal, Jack F. Douglas, Alamgir Karim

Abstract

We review recent advances in the application of combinatorial methods to polymer thin film characterization. Combinatorial methods allow the rapid exploration of multidimensional parameter spaces that naturally arise in the description of polymer film stability, the phase behavior of polymer blend films and surface pattern formation in block-copolymer films. First, we describe several novel combinatorial mapping techniques for the preparation of continuous temperature, thickness and surface energy gradients for polymer film libraries. Two novel methods introducing chemical etching of silicon substrate and UV/ozone treatment of chlorosilane treated silicon substrate are presented for creating macroscopically large surface energy gradients.These gradient surface energy substrate libraries are then used in developing a framework for understanding the stability of thin polymer films. This approach to investigating film stability reveals a near-universal scaling curve describing a wetting-dewetting transition for polystyrene films as a function of substrate surface energy.

Citation

Langmuir

Pub Type

Journals

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Keywords

combinatoric methods, high throughput methods, surface energy gradients, surface tension, ultrathin films, wetting-dewetting transition line

Citation

Raghavan, H. , Ashley, K. , Seghal, A. , Douglas, J. and Karim, A. (2005), Wetting-Dewetting Transition Line in Thin Polystyrene Films, Langmuir, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=852634 (Accessed October 16, 2025)