Self-Organized Nanostructures on Large Surfaces: A Versatile Toolbox

Challenges in nanotechnology today involve controlling dimensions, inter-particle spacing, surface coverage and behavior/response of functional nanostructures. Creating or placing nanostructures on surfaces is important for applications like data storage, on chip device fabrication, medical implants and many others. Surfaces can act as a support for nanostructures in addition to offering ways of interacting with them. To be able to realize applications, it is necessary to ensure manufacturing compatibility of techniques employed for creating these structures on large areas, and on diverse substrates. This often poses a serious limitation in scaling up many novel and innovative developments in the field. Self-organization of polymers offers an excellent solution for these concerns and also offering economic means of achieving ‘multi-purpose’ or ‘multi-functional’ nanostructures capable of meeting diverse requirements at the same time. The poster intends to present an example of such an approach carried out with diblock copolymer micelles on surfaces.