(511e) Nanometer-Scale Polymeric Structures on Surfaces: Pillars and Honeycombs

A novel method for the formation of nanometer-scale polymer structures via admicellar polymerization is described. Admicellar polymerization uses a surfactant layer adsorbed on a surface to localize monomer to the surface prior to polymerization of the monomer. Nanostructures are formed by restricting adsorption to the uncovered sites of an already-templated surface; in this case to the interstitial sites between adsorbed latex spheres. Unlike most other process that form polymer nanostructures, polymer dimensions can be significantly smaller than the interstitial size because of sphere-surfactant interactions. In addition, limited data is shown that demonstrates that the dimensions can be tuned by varying that interaction. The adsorption of proteins in the interstitial sites was also studied and nanostructure dimensions via adsorption are compared with nanostructure dimensions via polymerization.