Stability of thin polymer films on a corrugated substrate

Abstract

We study the wetting behaviour of thin polystyrene (PS) films on regularly corrugated silicon substrates. Below a critical film thickness the PS films are unstable and dewet the substrates. The dewetting process leads to the formation of nanoscopic PS channels filling the grooves of the corrugated substrates. Films thicker than the critical thickness appear stable and follow the underlying corrugation pattern. The critical thickness is found to scale with the radius of gyration of the unperturbed polymer chains.

Surface segregation of conformationally asymmetric polymer blends

“…Deviations from Silberberg hypothesis in thin polymer films were studied recently in Refs. [29,30,31,32]. Figure 4 shows that the contributions to the self-energy does not reduce to an effective potential as it was assumed in Ref.…”

Rupture of thin films with resonant substrate patterning

“…There has also been interest in the behavior of flowing films [30][31][32][33] and droplets (fully ruptured films) [34][35][36] on patterned surfaces, as well as films on substrates with patterning of a length scale comparable to molecular radii [37,38]. These cases are not be considered further here; we restrict our attention to the simplest possible physical situation.…”

Control of the structuring of thin soft matter films by means of different types of external disturbance

“…One can also use a structured substrate forcing the thin film to image it [5,6]. Contrary to (i) one needs to know the instability length scale only approximately because ideal imaging is possible in a range around it [7,8].…”