Thermal annealing as an easy tool for the controlled arrangement of gold nanoparticles in block-copolymer thin films.

Thermal annealing was used for the bottom-up fabrication of morphologically controlled gold-block-copolymer (Au-BC) nanocomposites. Three different blends formed by polystyrene (PS) homopolymer and PS-coated gold nanoparticles (PSSH@Au) were used as modifiers of asymmetric polystyrene-b-polymethylmethacrylate (PS-b-PMMA): PS26/PS26SH@Au, PS75/PS75SH@Au and PS167/PS167SH@Au (where the subscripts refer to the number of styrene monomeric units).The results indicated that all three blends used as modifiers (PSn/PSnSH@Au) were successfully located in the PS phase during thermally induced BC self-assembly for a composition range from 5 to 43 wt% without macro-phase separation.