Eur. Phys. J. E (2017) 40: 11
https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/i2017-11500-2

Regular Article

Influence of grafting on the glass transition temperature of PS thin films

¹ Laboratoire de Physique des Solides, CNRS, Univ. Paris-Sud, Université Paris-Saclay, 91405, Orsay Cedex, France
² Univ Lyon, Université Lyon 1, CNRS, Ingénierie des Matériaux Polymères, UMR 5223, F-69003, Lyon, France
³ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Northwestern University, 2220 Campus Drive, 60208, Evanston, Illinois, USA

^* e-mail: frederic.restagno@u-psud.fr

Received: 2 November 2016
Accepted: 9 January 2017
Published online: 27 January 2017

Abstract

We present an investigation of the effect of the interaction between a thin polystyrene film and its supporting substrate on its glass transition temperature (). We modulate this interaction by depositing the film on end-tethered polystyrene grafted layers of controlled molecular parameters. By comparing measurements versus film thickness for films deposited on different grafted layers and films deposited directly on a silicon substrate, we can conclude that there is no important effect of the film-subtrate interaction. Our interpretation of these results is that local orientation and dynamic effects substantial enough to influence cannot readily be obtained by grafting prepolymerized chains to a surface, due to intrinsic limitation of the surface grafting density.