Block copolymers have had major roles in the technological advances and breakthroughs in recent history. Applications of block copolymers include quantum dots, storage nanowire,
nanofiltration, photonic materials, and selective catalysis. A direct application of the primary project mentioned here is in nanoelectronics. In collaboration with the Spencer Group in the
Electrical Engineering Department at Cornell University, the goal of one summer project was to use a nanoporous block copolymer as a template to guide ordered nanopore formation in anodic alumina.
Success in this task would enable further “sizing down” of electronics and provide a foundation for the next generation of electronics. Another project dealt with characterizing a new block
copolymer sent by a collaborator outside of Cornell (U. Mass). This polymer’s composition suggested that it would have a spherical morphology in which a large sheet made of one of the two block
copolymer subunits would have little spheres of the other subunit inside. Analogously, a block of Swiss cheese has this same “morphology” with the cheese as the large matrix, or sheet, and the air
holes as the little spheres inside.
Publisher
Cornell Center for Materials Research
Date
2005-08-17
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Additional Notes
Acknowledgements: This work was supported by the Cornell Center for Materials Research and the National Science Foundation
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