Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

Publication Title

Nanotechnology

Keywords

polycaprolactone, infiltration, nanopatterning, block copolymers, bio

Abstract

Sequential infiltration synthesis (SIS) has emerged as a powerful technique to integrate inorganic materials into polymeric templates for fabricating functional hybrid and inorganic-only nanostructures. While several polymers, including self-assembled block copolymers (BCPs), have been widely used as templates for inorganic and hybrid oxide nanostructures, biocompatible polymers such as polycaprolactone (PCL) have not been explored for nanopatterning. In this work, we investigate SIS in polystyrene-block-polycaprolactone (PS-b-PCL) BCPs to demonstrate the feasibility of PCL as a guiding polymer for selective infiltration of Al2O3. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy confirmed the strong interaction of TMA–H2O precursors with the oxygen-containing functional groups of PCL, while scanning electron microscopy (SEM) revealed well-defined Al2O3 nanostructures after SIS and polymer removal. By varying the number of SIS cycles and processing temperatures, we observed systematic changes in the inorganic content and nanostructural fidelity, highlighting the tunability of the process. Notably, significant Al2O3 incorporation occurred during the first SIS cycle due to strong PCL–precursor interactions, even at temperatures as low as 60 °C, making the process relatively low-resource and efficient. These findings demonstrate that PCL is a promising guiding polymer for SIS, with potential to extend beyond conventional polymers such as polymethylmethacrylate. This work opens new opportunities for fabricating oxide nanostructures with applications in nanopatterning, dielectric layer, and bio-related nanomaterials.

Funding Source

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. DMR- 2116612 and DMR- 2213365. This article was published Open Access thanks to a transformative agreement between Milner Library and IOP.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.1088/1361-6528/ae11bb

Comments

First published in Nanotechnology (2025): https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6528/ae11bb

Download

Included in

Physics Commons

Share

COinS