The Polymer Society of Korea

Abstract

Structural disorder could induce unique properties such as quasiparticle localization, potentially serving as functional design elements for wave-manipulating devices. Such intriguing phenomena have brought about much research interest in tailoring structural disorder; however, reproduction and quantitative analysis of disordered nanostructures still remain experimentally challenging, with the term “disorder” itself often suffering from definitional ambiguity.
Here, we employ block copolymers to alter and characterize structural disorder. Starting from a hexagonal array formed in sphere-forming block copolymer thin film, we deliberately introduced and fine-tuned the disorder by adjusting readily accessible parameters, including annealing temperatures, incorporation ratio of metal precursors, and blending ratio with homopolymers. This study potentially offers a platform for engineering disordered systems that could mediate phenomena related to quasiparticle localization.