Abstract
We report the experimental results of an attempt to control the orientation of cylindrical microdomains using the directional coalescence of non-equilibrium spheres along the stretching direction (SD) of a triblock copolymer film. Thermal annealing, which induced the sphere-to-cylinder transition, was performed on the triblock copolymer film under the uniaxially stretched state. The orientational state of the body-centered cubic (BCC) lattice composed of spheres and a hexagonal lattice of cylinders were analyzed via atomic force microscopy and in situ two-dimensional small-angle X-ray scattering (2d-SAXS) measurements. Unlike the application of shear flow, cylinder orientation with its long axis parallel to the SD was not achieved by uniaxial stretching. The 2d-SAXS pattern for the specimen under the uniaxially stretched state showed a four-streak pattern, which quickly became more evident following thermal annealing and then changed into a four-spot pattern just before the sphere-to-cylinder transformation. The fact that the four-spot pattern is stable prior to the transformation suggests lattice commensuration upon the transformation from the deformed BCC lattice to the undeformed lattice without large-scale rearrangement of the spheres.
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Acknowledgements
This study was partially supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research C (no 25410226) and a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas, ‘New Polymeric Materials Based on Element-Blocks’ (no 15H00742) from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology of Japan. The SAXS experiments were performed at BL-10C, the Photon Factory of High Energy Research Organization (KEK), Japan (approval no 2015G591).
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Tomita, S., Shimizu, N., Igarashi, N. et al. Coalescence of non-equilibrium spheres through thermal annealing in a polystyrene-block-poly(ethylene-co-butylene)-block-polystyrene triblock copolymer film under a uniaxially stretched state. Polym J 49, 519–526 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/pj.2017.9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/pj.2017.9
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