Surface concentration of chain ends in polystyrene determined by static secondary ion mass spectroscopy

Abstract

Diblock and triblock copolymers of hydrogenous and deuterated styrene are synthetized to investigate chain-end segregation by static secondary ion mass spectroscopy. Films of the diblocks on silicon wafers show no significant chain-end segregation. In contrast, the triblocks show marked chain-end segregation on silicon wafers with or without the native oxide. Triblocks of isotopic structure D-H-D and H-D-H both showed end-group segregation, suggesting that the surface free energy differences between C-D and C-H are not the dominant factor