Substructure formation during pattern transposition from substrate into polymer blend film

A chemical pattern on a substrate is transposed into thin films of a ternary polymer blend during spin-casting from a common solvent. One of the blend components intercalates at interfaces between the other two phases to reduce their interfacial energy. As a result, an extensive substructure is formed, in addition to domains with pattern periodicity lambda. Morphologies with well-ordered lateral domains are created not only when the inherent scale of the phase domains R is comparable to lambda (as observed previously) but also for R similar to lambda/2, extending pattern transposition to smaller length scales.