Buckling Instabilities in Polymer Brush Surfaces via Postpolymerization Modification

Abstract

We report a simple route to engineer ultrathin polymer brush surfaces with wrinkled morphologies using postpolymerization modification (PPM), where the length scale of the buckled features can be tuned using PPM reaction time. We show that partial crosslinking of the outer layer of the polymer brush under poor solvent conditions is critical to obtain wrinkled morphologies upon swelling.