Highly Ordered Nanostructured Surfaces Obtained with Silica‐Filled Diblock‐Copolymer Micelles as Templates

Abstract

In this work, we present the size-controlled preparation of silica-filled micelle cores and their self-assembly behavior, which is dependent on the block lengths, different coating techniques, and substrates. Furthermore, we present a way to use these structures as templates for highly ordered magnetic nanostructures, revealed by Ar-ion milling. The resulting structures were characterized by different imaging and scattering techniques and model simulations were performed. The characterization of the obtained nanostructured surfaces has be performed with atomic force microscopy, by scanning electron microscopy, grazing-incidence X-ray small-angle scattering, and X-ray reflectivity measurements. The magneto-optical Kerr effect was utilized to investigate magnetic properties.

Self-assembled block copolymers: Bulk to thin film

“…445 Highly ordered arrays of silica dots, stripes and magnetic dots were also fabricated from block copolymer thin films. 446,447 Second, the conversion of the loaded metal ions of the micelles core into nanoparticles in the solution itself provides another interesting method to fabricate 2-D nanoparticle arrays. Block copolymer micelles have been extensively used to prepare metal-sulfide nanoparticles with controlled size.…”

Grazing incidence wide angle x-ray scattering at the wiggler beamline BW4 of HASYLAB

“…2,4,11 However, the development of novel material systems in the application as thin films or isolated surface structures on top of a solid support has gained tremendous interest. [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22] For example, thin films for application in organic photovoltaics are formed by photoactive polymers and block copolymers as well as blends of photoactive polymers arranged in functional multilayered systems. [23][24][25] Recently, we investigated the morphology of nanostructured titania thin films for hybrid photovoltaic devices including single titania thin films up to functional multilayer stacks present in real devices with GISAXS at beamline BW4.…”

Sub‐20 nm Magnetic Dots with Perpendicular Magnetic Anisotropy

“…The micelles were obtained by first synthesizing diblock copolymers from polystyrene and poly-2-vinylpyridine polymers. Spherical micelles were formed in toluene [24] and finally filled with amorphous SiO 2 [25,26]. A monolayer of the micelles was deposited on a Co/Pt multilayer film via dip-coating in a micellar solution with a dragging velocity of 20 mm min -1 and subsequent drying.…”