Electrohydrodynamic Micro-/Nanostructuring Processes Based on Prepatterned Polymer and Prepatterned Template

Abstract

As widely studied, the electrically induced micro-/nanostructuring process generally uses a prepatterned electrode to generate a spatially modulated electric field on an initially flat polymer surface to produce a nonuniform polymer deformation, leading to a structure with low aspect ratio, positive to the template pattern. However, a variant to this process that is proposed in this paper, which uses a flat electrode over an initially prepatterned polymer, can also generate the spatially modulated electric field. This paper presents a comparative study on the applicability of these two processes for microstructuring with high aspect ratio based on observations from our electrohydrodynamic simulation and experiment and shows that the proposed approach can provide a stronger electric modulation for the same experimental settings, therefore being more suitable for micro/nanostructuring with high aspect ratio.