Substrate Heterogeneity Induced Instability and Slip in Polymer Thin Films: Dewetting on Silanized Surfaces with Variable Grafting Density

Giant Slip Induced Anomalous Dewetting of an Ultrathin Film on a Viscous Sublayer

A 'giant' slip dynamics was engineered to a highly confined interface of a dewetting polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) ultrathin film by introducing a lubricating viscous polystyrene (PS) sublayer. The crossover of regimes from no-slip to giant-slip was engendered by tuning the viscosity and thickness of the sublayer. A long-range hole-rim interaction with increase in slippage on the PMMA-PS interface transformed the circular holes on the PMMA surface into the noncircular faceted ones. The extent of the slippage and the transition of the length scales from slip-dominated to no-slip regime were evaluated using a general linear stability analysis. The proposed formulation provided an analytical tool to evaluate the slippage effective at the soft and deformable liquid-liquid interfaces.

The influence of polymer architectures on the dewetting behavior of thin polymer films: from linear chains to ring chains

The dewetting behavior of ring polystyrene (RPS) film and linear polystyrene (LPS) film on silanized Si substrates with different grafting densities and PDMS substrate was investigated. Results showed that polymer architectures greatly influenced the dewetting behavior of the thin polymer film. On the silanized Si substrate with 69% grafting density, RPS chains exhibited stronger adsorption compared with LPS chains, and as a result the wetting layer formed more easily. For LPS films, with a decreased annealing temperature, the stability of the polymer film changed from non-slip dewetting via apparent slip dewetting to apparently stable. However, for RPS films, the polymer film stability switched from apparent slip dewetting to apparently stable. On the silanized Si substrate with 94% grafting density, the chain adsorption became weaker and the dewetting processes were faster than that on the substrate with 69% grafting density at the same experimental temperature for both the LPS and RPS films. Moreover, on the PDMS substrate, LPS films always showed non-slip dewetting, while the dewetting kinetics of RPS films switched from non-slip dewetting to slip dewetting behaviour. Forming the wetting layer strongly influenced the stability and dewetting behavior of the thin polymer films.

Instability, self-organization and pattern formation in thin soft films

The free surface of a thin soft polymer film is often found to become unstable and self-organizes into various meso-scale structures. In this article we classify the instability of a thin polymer film into three broad categories, which are: category 1: instability of an ultra-thin (<100 nm) viscous film engendered by amplification of thermally excited surface capillary waves due to interfacial dispersive van der Waals forces; category 2: instability arising from the attractive inter-surface interactions between the free surface of a soft film exhibiting room temperature elasticity and another rigid surface in its contact proximity; and category 3: instability caused by an externally applied field such as an electric field or a thermal gradient, observed in both viscous and elastic films. We review the salient features of each instability class and highlight how characteristic length scales, feature morphologies, evolution pathways, etc. depend on initial properties such as film thickness, visco-elasticity (rheology), residual stress, and film preparation conditions. We emphasize various possible strategies for aligning and ordering of the otherwise isotropic structures by combining the essential concepts of bottom-up and top-down approaches. A perspective, including a possible future direction of research, novelty and limitations of the methods, particularly in comparison to the existing patterning techniques, is also presented for each setting.