PEO– 液晶ブロックコポリマー薄膜の ナノテンプレートプロセスとスマートメンブレンへの展開

Abstract

A new wave is surging on a long history of microphase-separated nanostructures in block copolymers as the selfassembled nanostructures leading to industrial use as the coming engineered plastics. Emphasis should be placed on both high reproducibility and mass production of these ordered nanostructures through self-assembling nanofabrication processes, expected as one of the powerful counterparts of the top–down–type nanofabrication such as lithography and beam processing. In 2001 we developed highly reliable nanostructured template film, in which newly designed amphiphilic liquid crystalline block copolymers show normally oriented and hexagonally arranged nanocylinder array structures in meter–sized area thin films. This success satisfies the above requirements applicable to industrial use and also guarantees their high regularity as reliable nanotemplates for structural transcription to and hybridization with various kinds of materials such as metal, semiconductors, and so on. Furthermore, we also introduce the fabrication process of free–standing membranes equipped with fully penetrated straight channels by using a series of amphiphilic liquid crystalline block copolymers, which form normally oriented and hexagonally arranged cylindrical domains with a high aspect ratio up to more than 400.