Organic-inorganic nanohybridization by block copolymer thin films

A simple route for fabricating highly ordered organic-inorganic hybrid nanostructures, using polystyrene-block-poly(ethylene oxide) diblock copolymer (PS-b-PEO) thin films coupled with sol-gel chemistry, is presented. Hexagonally packed arrays of titania nanodomains were generated by one-step spin-coating from solutions containing a titania precursor and PS-b-PEO, where the precursor was selectively incorporated into the PEO domain. The PS-b-PEO template was subsequently removed by UV treatment, leaving behind a highly dense array of hexagonally packed titania dots. The size of the dots, as well as the lattice spacing of the array, could be fine-tuned by simply controlling the relative amount of sol-gel precursor to PS-WPEO.