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Science 15 August 2008:
Vol. 321. no. 5891, pp. 939 - 943
DOI: 10.1126/science.1159352
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Reports

Graphoepitaxy of Self-Assembled Block Copolymers on Two-Dimensional Periodic Patterned Templates

Ion Bita,1*{dagger} Joel K. W. Yang,2* Yeon Sik Jung,1* Caroline A. Ross,1{ddagger} Edwin L. Thomas,1{ddagger} Karl K. Berggren2{ddagger}

Self-assembling materials are the building blocks of bottom-up nanofabrication processes, but they need to be templated to impose long-range order and eliminate defects. In this work, the self-assembly of a thin film of a spherical-morphology block copolymer is templated using an array of nanoscale topographical elements that act as surrogates for the minority domains of the block copolymer. The orientation and periodicity of the resulting array of spherical microdomains are governed by the commensurability between the block copolymer period and the template period and is accurately described by a free-energy model. This method, which forms high-spatial-frequency arrays using a lower-spatial-frequency template, will be useful in nanolithography applications such as the formation of high-density microelectronic structures.

1 Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
2 Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

* These authors contributed equally to this work.

{dagger} Present address: Qualcomm Micro Electro Mechanical Systems Technologies, 2581 Junction Avenue, San Jose, CA 95134, USA.

{ddagger} To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: caross{at}mit.edu (C.A.R.), elt{at}mit.edu (E.L.T.), berggren{at}mit.edu (K.K.B.)

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THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Macroscopic 10-Terabit-per-Square-Inch Arrays from Block Copolymers with Lateral Order.
S. Park, D. H. Lee, J. Xu, B. Kim, S. W. Hong, U. Jeong, T. Xu, and T. P. Russell (2009)
Science 323, 1030-1033
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