Eur. Phys. J. E (2003) 12: 93-96
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjed/e2003-01-022-4

First inelastic neutron scattering studies on thin free standing polymer films

¹ Institut Laue-Langevin, 6 rue Jules Horowitz, 38042 Grenoble, France
² Department of Physics & Astronomy and the Brockhouse Institute for Materials Research, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, L8S 4M1, Canada
³ Department of Physics and Guelph-Waterloo Physics Institute, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada
⁴ Department of Physics and Guelph-Waterloo Physics Institute, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, N1G 2W1, Canada
⁵ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, S3 7RH, U.K.

Received: 1 January 2003
Published online: 5 November 2003

Abstract

Glass transition studies in free standing polymer films have revealed values of the transition temperature, T _g , which were substantially reduced below the bulk for sufficiently thin films. Here we report on the preparation of two stacks of free standing polystyrene films: 70 films with a thickness of h ∼ 107 nm and 140 films with h ∼ 55 nm with equivalent total sample thicknesses of approximately 7.5 μm. We have performed the first measurements on such samples using inelastic neutron scattering, and demonstrate that inelastic neutron scattering experiments, performed on the time-of-flight spectrometer IN6 and the backscattering spectrometer IN16 at the Institut Laue-Langevin, are feasible.