Polymer Brush Photolithography

The covalent attachment of polymers has emerged as a powerful strategy for the preparation of multi-functional surfaces. Patterned, surface-grafted polymer brushes provide spatial control over a variety of physical properties and allow for fabrication of ‘intelligent’ substrates which selectively adapt to their environment. However, the route towards such patterned polymer brush surfaces often remains challenging, creating a demand for more efficient and less complicated fabrication strategies. Here, we describe recent advances in our group in reduction photolithography to produce topographically and chemically pattern polymer brushes by using light-mediated controlled radical polymerization. We highlight recent work on expanding our technique towards photoinduced electron/energy transfer (PET) reversible addition–fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) polymerization and our advances into combining different orthogonal polymerization techniques for chemically-ambiguous surfaces.