Thickness dependence of the dynamics in thin films of isotactic poly (methylmethacrylate)

Glass-Transition and Side-Chain Dynamics in Thin Films: Explaining Dissimilar Free Surface Effects for Polystyrene vs Poly(methyl methacrylate)

Despite having very similar bulk properties such as glass-transition temperature (T_g), density, and fragility, polystyrene (PS) and poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) exhibit characteristically different T_g depression in free-standing ultrathin films due to free surface effects. Here we explain this difference using our recently established chemistry-specific coarse-grained (CG) models for these two polymers. Models capture the dissimilar scaling of T_g with free-standing film thickness as seen in experiments and enable us to quantify the size of the regions near free surfaces over which chain relaxation exhibits differences from bulk. Most interestingly, vibrational density of states (VDOS) analysis uncovers a relationship between the amplitude of side-chain fluctuations, associated with side-chain flexibility and T_g-nanoconfinement. We discover that increasing backbone to side-chain mass ratio in CG models increases the amplitude of side-chain fluctuations and suppresses the free-surface effect on T_g. We show that mass distribution and side-chain flexibility are central to explain dissimilar free surface effects on PS and PMMA. Our model predictions are further corroborated by experimental evidence showing the role of mass distribution in styrene thin films. Our study ascertains the significance of molecular characteristics on nanoconfinement and highlights the ability for chemistry-specific CG models to explore the thermomechanical properties of polymer thin films.

Distribution of glass transition temperature in multilayered poly(methyl methacrylate) thin film supported on a Si substrate as studied by neutron reflectivity

We studied the distribution of glass transition temperature (Tg) through neutron reflectivity in a poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) thin film supported on a silicon substrate with a five-layered PMMA thin film consisting of deuterated-PMMA and hydrogenated-PMMA. The depth distribution of Tg was successfully observed in the PMMA thin film. Compared to the previously reported distribution of Tg in a polystyrene thin film, the presence of a long-range interfacial effect, supposedly caused by an interaction between PMMA and the substrate, is considered to be responsible for the differences in both the distribution of Tg and the thickness dependence of Tg in both polymers. Therefore, it is expected that the thickness dependence of Tg reported for single-layered polymer thin films can, in principle, be understood from the viewpoint of the difference in the depth distribution of Tg.

Dramatic stiffening of ultrathin polymer films in the rubbery regime

Recently, we (P.A. O'Connell, G.B. McKenna, Science 307, 1760 (2005)) introduced a novel nano-bubble inflation method to measure the absolute creep compliance of nanometer thick polymer films. In that work it was shown that even at film thicknesses as small as 27.5nm the glass temperature was unchanged for poly(vinyl acetate) (PVAc). Perhaps more importantly, and the subject of the present work, was the observation that these ultrathin films show a dramatic stiffening in the rubbery plateau regime, i.e., the compliance was reduced by over two orders of magnitude compared to the bulk material. In the present work we substantiate the previous results in a study of the thickness dependence of the rubbery compliance of PVAc and polystyrene (PS) films for thicknesses from 13nm to 276nm. We show the substantial stiffening of the plateau region for both materials. Furthermore, the rubbery compliance (inverse of stiffness) scales with approximately the second power ( 1.8+/-0.2) in the film thickness for both materials.