Nanoparticles Induced Morphology Modulation and Stability in Dewetting of Thin Polymer Films.

With this work, we explore different aspects of influence of nanoparticles in dewetting of ultra-thin polymer film. Ultra-thin polymer films have tendency to rupture and dewet due to active interfacial van der Waal’s force. While stabilization of thin polymer single layer films with nanoparticles is well known phenomenon now. We, here, explore the morphology modulation in dewetting of nanoparticle containing single layer polymer films, at a regime where films still dewet. Through this we establish an extra parameter by which we can modulate the feature size and even obtain miniaturized dewetted structures at certain specific condition.

As a continuation, we also investigate the influence of nanoparticles to multi polymer system such as polymer bilayer thin films and polymer blend thin films. A multi polymer system involves various parameters through which morphology and dewetting can be tuned. In such cases, addition of particles not only imparts stability (at certain regime), but also modulates the phase segregated morphology, in case of polymer blend thin films, and dewetted features of polymer bilayer. With this we establish interplay of fundamental phenomena due to which such morphology modulation and stabilization are observed.