Microcontact Printing: Dynamic Microcontact Printing for Patterning Polymer‐Brush Microstructures (Small 15/2011)

The image illustrates dynamic printing using a conventional PDMS stamp by moving or jumping the stamp during microcontact printing (μCP). This new strategy, denoted “dynamic μCP”, could be combined with SI-ATRP to fabricate new, complex (hierarchical and gradient) polymer-brush microstructures with a number of feature morphologies that do not exist on the original stamp. The advantage lies in being able to pattern a series of complex polymer-brush microstructures using a single stamp without sophisticated instrumentation. This allows the various printing conditions for the transfer of thiols onto metallic surfaces to be systematically established, and, further, it provides a point of departure to micro/nanofabrication applied not only to pattern polymer brushes, but also to other fields, such as selective wet etching or the deposition of different materials.