GIUSAXS and AFM studies on surface reconstruction of latex thin films during thermal treatment

Shanshan Hu; Jens Rieger; Stephan V Roth; Rainer Gehrke; Reinhold J Leyrer; Yongfeng Men

doi:10.1021/la801527y

GIUSAXS and AFM studies on surface reconstruction of latex thin films during thermal treatment

Langmuir. 2009 Apr 7;25(7):4230-4. doi: 10.1021/la801527y.

Authors

Shanshan Hu¹, Jens Rieger, Stephan V Roth, Rainer Gehrke, Reinhold J Leyrer, Yongfeng Men

Affiliation

¹ State Key Laboratory of Polymer Physics and Chemistry, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Renmin Street 5625, 130022 Changchun, PR China.

PMID: 18925752
DOI: 10.1021/la801527y

Abstract

The structural evolution of a single-layer latex film during annealing was studied via grazing incidence ultrasmall-angle X-ray scattering (GIUSAXS) and atomic force microscopy (AFM). The latex particles were composed of a low-Tg (-54 degrees C) core (n-butylacrylate, 30 wt %) and a high-Tg (41 degrees C) shell (t-butylacrylate, 70 wt %) and had an overall diameter of about 500 nm. GIUSAXS data indicate that the q(y) scan at q(z) = 0.27 nm(-1) (out-of-plane scan) contains information about both the structure factor and the form factor. The GIUSAXS data on latex films annealed at various temperatures ranging from room temperature to 140 degrees C indicate that the structure of the latex thin film beneath the surface changed significantly. The evolution of the out-of-plane scan plot reveals the surface reconstruction of the film. Furthermore, we also followed the time-dependent behavior of structural evolution when the latex film was annealed at a relatively low temperature (60 degrees C) where restructuring within the film can be followed that cannot be detected by AFM, which detects only surface morphology. Moreover, compared to AFM studies GIUSAXS provides averaged information covering larger areas.