Surface micellar nanopattern formation of adsorbed diblock copolymer systems

In this paper, we investigate theoretically the structure of an ultrathin layer of diblock copolymers. It is assumed that one of the blocks is strongly adsorbed on a planar surface while the nonadsorbed block aggregates with the formation of surface micelles. We adopt a simple model in which the adsorbed blocks of the copolymers are assumed: to form a two-dimensional melt while the surface micelles of the second blocks are approximated by parts of a sphere. The equilibrium structure of the micelles, which is governed by the interplay of the surface energy which favours the aggregation process and the energy of stretching of the adsorbed blocks is analyzed. It is shown that the number of the chains in one micelle, the radius and the height of the micelles scale with the length N-B of a nonadsorbed block as N-B(1/2).