Well-ordered self-assembled nanostructures of block copolymer films via synergistic integration of chemoepitaxy and zone annealing

It is an extremely challenging task to fabricate macroscopically well-ordered nanostructures of block copolymers in a limited annealing time. In this work, we propose a novel integrated strategy of chemoepitaxy and zone annealing to direct the self-assembly of lamella-forming block copolymers. Large-scale numerical simulations corroborate that the integrated strategy has the capability to generate well-aligned and well-oriented lamellae over a macroscopic area via the synergy between the alignment guidance of the chemical template and the defect annihilation of zone annealing, even though the guiding stripes of the chemical template are extremely sparse. It is further demonstrated that the effective annealing time to achieve the well-ordered nanostructures is strongly dependent upon the pitch of guiding stripes and the thickness of block copolymer films. This work provides an instructive example for boosting the directing efficiency of chemoepitaxy through the integrated strategy, and lays the groundwork for rapidly fabricating well-ordered nanostructures of block copolymer nanolithography.