SMART transfer method to directly compare the mechanical response of water-supported and free-standing ultrathin polymeric films

Luke A. Galuska; Eric S. Muckley; Zhiqiang Cao; Dakota F. Ehlenberg; Zhiyuan Qian; Song Zhang; Simon Rondeau-Gagné; Minh D. Phan; John F. Ankner; Ilia N. Ivanov; Xiaodan Gu

doi:10.1038/s41467-021-22473-w

SMART transfer method to directly compare the mechanical response of water-supported and free-standing ultrathin polymeric films

Luke A. Galuska, Eric S. Muckley, Zhiqiang Cao, Dakota F. Ehlenberg, Zhiyuan Qian, Song Zhang, Simon Rondeau-Gagné, Minh D. Phan, John F. Ankner, Ilia N. Ivanov, Xiaodan Gu

STS Project Technical Systems

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

41 Scopus citations

Abstract

Intrinsic mechanical properties of sub-100 nm thin films are markedly difficult to obtain, yet an ever-growing necessity for emerging fields such as soft organic electronics. To complicate matters, the interfacial contribution plays a major role in such thin films and is often unexplored despite supporting substrates being a main component in current metrologies. Here we present the shear motion assisted robust transfer technique for fabricating free-standing sub-100 nm films and measuring their inherent structural–mechanical properties. We compare these results to water-supported measurements, exploring two phenomena: 1) The influence of confinement on mechanics and 2) the role of water on the mechanical properties of hydrophobic films. Upon confinement, polystyrene films exhibit increased strain at failure, and reduced yield stress, while modulus is reduced only for the thinnest 19 nm film. Water measurements demonstrate subtle differences in mechanics which we elucidate using quartz crystal microbalance and neutron reflectometry.

Original language	English
Article number	2347
Journal	Nature Communications
Volume	12
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22473-w
State	Published - Dec 1 2021

Funding

We thank the financial support from U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Science, under award number of DE-SC0019361. L.A.G. acknowledges support from the NSF NRT program “Interface” award #DGE-1449999) through the University of Southern Mississippi. Part of this research utilized quartz crystal microbalance, which was conducted at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility. A portion of this research utilized beamline BL-4B (LIQREF) at the Spallation Neutron Source, a DOE Office of Science User Facility operated by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. S.R.-G. thanks the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) for financial support through a Discovery Grant (RGPIN-2017-06611).

Funders	Funder number
National Science Foundation	-1449999
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Science
Basic Energy Sciences	DE-SC0019361
University of Southern Mississippi
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada	RGPIN-2017-06611

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Galuska, L. A., Muckley, E. S., Cao, Z., Ehlenberg, D. F., Qian, Z., Zhang, S., Rondeau-Gagné, S., Phan, M. D., Ankner, J. F., Ivanov, I. N., & Gu, X. (2021). SMART transfer method to directly compare the mechanical response of water-supported and free-standing ultrathin polymeric films. Nature Communications, 12(1), Article 2347. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22473-w

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abstract = "Intrinsic mechanical properties of sub-100 nm thin films are markedly difficult to obtain, yet an ever-growing necessity for emerging fields such as soft organic electronics. To complicate matters, the interfacial contribution plays a major role in such thin films and is often unexplored despite supporting substrates being a main component in current metrologies. Here we present the shear motion assisted robust transfer technique for fabricating free-standing sub-100 nm films and measuring their inherent structural–mechanical properties. We compare these results to water-supported measurements, exploring two phenomena: 1) The influence of confinement on mechanics and 2) the role of water on the mechanical properties of hydrophobic films. Upon confinement, polystyrene films exhibit increased strain at failure, and reduced yield stress, while modulus is reduced only for the thinnest 19 nm film. Water measurements demonstrate subtle differences in mechanics which we elucidate using quartz crystal microbalance and neutron reflectometry.",

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AU - Qian, Zhiyuan

AU - Zhang, Song

AU - Rondeau-Gagné, Simon

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SMART transfer method to directly compare the mechanical response of water-supported and free-standing ultrathin polymeric films

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