Citation: Yuan-Yuan Pang, Sheng-Xiang Ji. Effect of Ink Molecular Weights and Annealing Conditions on Molecular Transfer Printing[J]. Chinese Journal of Polymer Science, ;2018, 36(6): 697-702. doi: 10.1007/s10118-018-2056-4 shu

Effect of Ink Molecular Weights and Annealing Conditions on Molecular Transfer Printing

Yuan-Yuan Pang ^a,b ,
Sheng-Xiang Ji ^a,,

a.
Key Laboratory of Polymer Ecomaterials, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun 130022, China
b.
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China

Corresponding author: Sheng-Xiang Ji, sji@ciac.ac.cn
Received Date: 15 September 2017
Accepted Date: 7 October 2017
Available Online: 30 January 2018

The molecular transfer printing (MTP) technique has been invented to fabricate chemical patterns with high fidelity using homopolymer inks. In this work, we systematically studied the effects of the molecular weights of homopolymer inks and transfer conditions on the MTP process. We explored a large range of molecular weights (~3.5-56 kg·mol^-1) of hydroxyl-terminated polystyrene (PS-OH) and hydroxyl-terminated poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA-OH) in the MTP process, and found that the resulting chemical patterns on replicas from all five blends were functional and able to direct the assembly of films of the same blends. The transfer temperature and the film annealing sequences had an impact on the MTP process. MTP was sensitive to the transfer temperature and could only be performed within a certain temperature range, i.e. higher than the glass transition temperature (T_g) of copolymers and lower than the rearrangement temperature of the assembled domains. Pre-organization of the blend films was also necessary for MTP since the preferential wetting of PMMA domains at the replica surface might result in the formation of a PMMA wetting layer to prevent the presentation of underlying chemical patterns to the replica surface.
- Block copolymer,
- Molecular transfer printing,
- Thermal annealing,
- Chemical pattern,
- Directed self-assembly
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