Development of temperature and depth dependence techniques using GISAXS on diblock copolymers

Polymer films are showing great potential in the development of many new fields including biomaterials, microelectronics, and optoelectronics. An understanding of depth-dependent static and dynamic properties is essential to produce these highly functionalized materials. This work demonstrates as a proof-of-principle that it is possible to achieve this using grazing incidence small angle x-ray scattering (GISAXS). It documents the development of a new sample chamber which can be installed at different synchrotron facilities to collect data. This relatively inexpensive furnace is capable of heating and rapidly quenching a polymer film spin-coated on a silicon wafer to measure its static and dynamic temperature-dependent properties. It also documents the development of a depth profiling algorithm which can deconvolve scattering information as a function of depth into the sample from a series of GISAXS images. The results from a diblock copolymer sample are compared to images from scanning electron microscopy taken from the cleaved edge of the same sample. The success of the new furnace and the depth profiling algorithm demonstrates that it is possible to create depth-dependent phase and ordering kinetics diagrams of diblock copolymer samples using GISAXS.