Phase Transitions of Polymer Blends and Block Copolymer Melts in Thin Films

Abstract

Polymer mixtures and block copolymers in thin film geometry find much recent attention, both theoretically [1–63] and experimentally [5,7,8,29,64–122]. This interest arises because of various applications of thin polymer films in materials science (adhesive properties, lubrication, coatings, etc.) [123,124], but also from the point of view of basic science: e.g., from suitable measurements of thin films of polymer mixtures one can extract information on bulk phase behavior (e.g. [70,81]), interfacial widths (e.g. [84,125]), and surface properties controlling surface enrichment or the formation of wetting layers (e.g. [5,8,65,69,74–82, 126]). In such thin films, one may also observe very interesting kinetic phenomena and associated structure formation, e.g. growth of surface enrichment layers and adjacent depletion layers [66,69,83], dynamics of phase inversion in unmixed films [77], and — last but not least — surface-directed spinodal decomposition [5,127–158]. Of course, also the dynamics of ordering in block copolymer films is a topic of great current interest (e.g. [101]), but will not be considered further in this article.