In doing so, they want to increase the likelihood of characterizing material properties at the smallest scale. Future computer chips, energy conversion and storage techniques, and molecular sieves, will all require materials with structures in the range of just a few nanometers. The study’s results have now been featured as the cover article in ACS Applied Polymer Materials.
Dr. Jörg Lindner, Professor, Nanostructuring - Nanoanalytics - Photonic Materials, Paderborn University Block copolymers enable future-oriented processes for further miniaturizing next-generation microelectronic components by enabling the development of incredibly small structures on semiconductor surfaces.
“Block copolymers can help here, too—but only after the chemical differences between the involved polymer types are increased by selectively modifying one of the polymers. Selectively integrating aluminum oxide using sequential infiltration synthesis makes it possible to create nanostructures that can be used to test these new measurement processes,” Dr. Lindner concluded.