A number of emerging “nano-technological” applications, such as terabyte magnetic memories, require ordered structures to be constructed with a unit cell dimension of 10 to 50 nm, well beyond the limits of even deep-UV optical lithography. For these purposes it would be useful to produce block copolymer films with long range ordered domain structures. Various strategies exist to obtain long range ordered domain structures in one direction, e.g. alignment of cylinders with electric fields, but obtaining well ordered structures of spherical domains has been difficult, though methods based on both ordering of micelles from solution as well as from molten films show promise. A recent discovery that molten films of spherical domain block copolymers will order to produce closely packed layers of spheres that are parallel to the film surface offers the possibility of templating order in these films by graphoepitaxy. Unlike conventional heteroepitaxy, where single crystal films of atoms form during growth by nearly matching the lattice periodicity of an underlying single crystal, graphoepitaxy templates epitaxial growth from a surface relief structure of the substrate. In this talk I will discuss the conditions necessary for the production of epitaxial order in block copolymer films using a graphoepitaxy approach as well as its limitations.

Edward J. Kramer is a Professor of Materials and Chemical Engineering at The University of California at Santa Barbara. He received the B.Ch.E. degree in Chemical Engineering from Cornell University in 1962 and the Ph.D. in Metallurgy and Materials Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1967. After a NATO postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford, he joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Cornell University in 1967 and rose through the professorial ranks until he was appointed the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of MS&E in 1988. He moved to UCSB in 1997 where his research focuses on mesoscale polymer physics involving interfacial structure and properties utilizing quantitative transmission electron microscopy, Rutherford backscattering and forward recoil spectrometry, secondary ion mass spectrometry and neutron reflectometry. He is currently the leader of the Mesoscopic Macromolecular Assemblies Interdisciplinary Research Group of the Materials Research Lab at UCSB. He is a Fellow of APS and AAAS. He was elected a Member of the National Academy of Engineering (1989) and was awarded the Docteur honoris causa by L'Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (1995). He won the High Polymer Physics Prize of the American Physical Society (with R. P. Kambour) (1985), the Swinburne Award (1996) of The Institute of Materials (UK) (1996), the U. S. Senior Scientist Award of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (1987-88), and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1988).

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