Organic–Inorganic Nanohybridization by Block Copolymer Thin Films

Abstract A simple route for fabricating highly ordered organic–inorganic hybrid nanostructures, using polystyrene‐block‐poly(ethylene oxide) diblock copolymer (PS‐b‐PEO) thin films coupled with sol–gel chemistry, is presented. Hexagonally packed arrays of titania nanodomains were generated by one‐step spin‐coating from solutions containing a titania precursor and PS‐b‐PEO, where the precursor was selectively incorporated into the PEO domain. The PS‐b‐PEO template was subsequently removed by UV treatment, leaving behind a highly dense array of hexagonally packed titania dots. The size of the dots, as well as the lattice spacing of the array, could be fine‐tuned by simply controlling the relative amount of sol–gel precursor to PS‐b‐PEO.