(plastemart) --
The development of a new copolymer, combining sugar-based with oil-based
macromolecules, makes it possible to design ultra-thin films capable of
self-organization on a scale of just 5 nm. This opens up new horizons for
increasing the capacity of hard discs and the speed of microprocessors.
The result of a French-American collaboration spearheaded by the Centre
National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), published in ACS Nano, this work
has led to the filing of two patents. This new class of thin films based on
hybrid copolymers could give rise to numerous applications in flexible
electronics, in areas as diverse as nanolithography, biosensors and photovoltaic
cells. the team headed by Redouane Borsali, CNRS senior researcher at the Centre
de Recherches sur les Macromolecules Vegetales (CERMAV), came up with a hybrid
material, combining sugar-based and petroleum-derived (silicon-containing
polystyrene) polymers with widely different physical and chemical
characteristics.
This copolymer, formed of highly incompatible
elementary building blocks, is similar to an oil bubble attached to a small
water bubble. The researchers have shown that this type of structure is capable
of organizing itself into sugar cylinders within a petroleum-based polymer
lattice, each structure having a size of 5 nanometers, i.e. much smaller than
the resolution of "old" copolymers, exclusively composed of petroleum
derivatives. |
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