Tunable surface nanostructures from Block copolymer self-assembly

Nanostructures are known to exhibit novel optical, electrical, and magnetic and many other interesting physical properties and a lot of research has been invested on the synthesis and study of such structures in the recent years. The massive drive towards miniaturization of devices heavily relies on the successful functioning of nanostructures. Self-assembly (or the bottom-up approaches) is emerging as an attractive tool for creating functional nanostructures owing to its simplicity and relatively low cost approaches. Nanostructures with high density and periodicity on surface are important in applications like high density data storage, sensors, catalyst support surfaces and other functional interfaces. Reverse micelles formed by the self-organization of amphiphilic diblock copolymer molecules have been used to create an array of polymer nanoparticles on silicon surface by spin coating . The formation of reverse micelles, the means of tuning their sizes and systematically varying the periodicities using solvent quality, solution concentration, deposition conditions and polymer molecular weight as handles will be presented. The hydrophilic core of the reverse micelles is capable of binding metal ions and so, inorganic nanoparticle arrays can be derived from these micelle arrays. The size of the nanoparticles in the array is further tunable by working on the loading conditions. The tunability of nanoparticle sizes will be presented as well.