Ordering kinetics of lamella-forming block copolymers under the guidance of various external fields studied by dynamic self-consistent field theory

Self-consistent field theory with a dynamic extension is exploited to investigate the kinetics of the lamellar formation of symmetric block copolymers under the direction of external fields. In particular, three types of directed self-assembly methods – a permanent field for chemo-epitaxy, a dynamic field for zone annealing and an integrated permanent/dynamic field – are examined. For the chemo-epitaxy involving sparsely prepatterned substrates or zone annealing, the block copolymers generally develop into polycrystalline nanostructures with multiple orientations due to the lack of strong driving forces for eliminating the long-lived imperfections in a limited time. As the integrated chemo-epitaxy and zone annealing method is applied to the block copolymer systems, single-crystalline nanostructures with precisely registered orientations are achieved in a short annealing time owing to the mutual acceleration of defect annihilations, which cannot be produced by the conventional techniques alone. Furthermore, the integrated method allows the rapid fabrication of well-ordered nanostructures on the extremely sparse prepatterned substrates. Our theoretical work may serve to rationalize the faster modern nanolithographic fabrication of smaller microelectronic components using lower-spatial-frequency templates.