Wetting on Grafted Polymer Films

Abstract

Studying the properties of endanchored polymer layers has been a fashionable occupation for numerous physicists, chemists, and material scientists for more than 10 years. Theoreticians have realized that grafted macromolecules are nice statistical objects wriggling around under thermal motion, which give rise to nontrivial long-range entropic effects. These can be described by elegant scaling laws and analogies with quantum or classical mechanics. For experimenters the area turned out to be a marvelous playground in which both very simple and sophisticated techniques such as x-ray or neutron scattering and reflectivity, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), Rutherford backscattering, and optical and atomic force microscopy (AFM) have been used to discover interesting and subtle phenomena. All this effort was also motivated by the importance of grafted layers in applications such as paints, adhesives, lubricants, colloidal stabilizers, and composite materials. By anchoring a thin, soft polymer layer to a solid surface, one can tune the surface properties. In this short article, we will discuss how the wetting and spreading of liquids and polymer melts can be profoundly altered by the presence of such protective layers.