Date/Time
Date(s) - 06/10/2010
3:20 pm - 4:20 pm

Title: How Glassy are Glassy Surfaces?

Speaker: Dr. James Forrest, University of Waterloo

Institute: University of Waterloo

Location: ABB 102

Description:

In the past 2 decades there has been significant interest in the properties of the near surface region of glassy polymers. A lot of this interest originates from the potential role of the free surface in measurements of anomalous dynamics in highly confined systems such as thin films. In this talk I will discuss our recent measurements probing the dynamical properties of the near surface region with nm precision. Through the use of nanoparticle embedding and relaxation of nanoscale indentations, we have been able to show that some polymer surfaces relax even when the sample as a whole is very clearly in a glassy state. In some cases as much as 130K below the glass transition temperature. This has significant impact on some suggested applications such as the IBM millipede project for ultra-high density information storage. In the final part of the talk, I will explore the universality of the idea of enhanced surface mobility to non-polymeric materials. In order to connect with some of today’s buzzwords – this has important implications for nanoprocessing of soft materials.