Advanced Materials, Vol.17, No.15, 1878-1878, 2005
Shear-induced alignment in thin films of spherical nanodomains
Large-scale alignment of bilayer block copolymer films by applying in-plane shear is demonstrated. The method eliminates all disclinations and most dislocations from arbitrarily large samples, as evidenced by atomic force microscopy of the microdomain lattice (Figure, left) as well as its Fourier transform (Figure, right). The resulting films can act as ordered nanolithographic templates.