Dewetting of highly elastic thin polymer films

Abstract

Investigations of the opening of holes in thin, almost glassy polystyrene films deposited onto silicon wafers coated with a polydimethylsiloxane monolayer revealed strong deviations from the behavior of pure liquids. At early stages, these holes grew independent of the molecular weight of the polymer and without the formation of a rim. At later stages, a highly asymmetric rim was built up with the maximum height increasing linearly with the diameter of the hole. As the polymer cannot flow under the conditions of the experiments, our experiments demonstrate that capillary forces are able to provoke plastic deformation on a micron scale in thin quasisolid films.