A simple route to highly oriented and ordered nanoporous block copolymer templates

Controlling the orientation and lateral ordering of the block copolymer microdomains is essential to their use as templates and scaffolds for the fabrication of nanostructured materials. In addition, a process must be robust, simple to implement, and rapid, and should not introduce disruptive processing steps that would impede their use. Here, we describe thin films of poly(styrene-b-4-vinylpyridine) (PS-b-P4VP) diblock copolymers, spin-coated from mixed solvents that show highly oriented, cylindrical microdomains with a high degree of order on a wide range of substrates, including silicon oxide, polystyrene, germanium, polyimide, and poly(butylene terephthalate). In addition, the preferential solvation of the P4VP block with an alcohol caused a surface reconstruction that resulted in the formation of a nanoporous film upon drying. The evaporation of gold onto the reconstructed films produced thermally stable and reactive ion etching resistant films.