Capillary effects in guided crystallization of organic thin films
Alta Fang,
Anna K. Hailey,
Abigail Grosskopf,
John E. Anthony,
Yueh-Lin Loo,
Mikko Haataja
Affiliations
Alta Fang
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA
Anna K. Hailey
Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA
Abigail Grosskopf
Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA
John E. Anthony
Department of Chemistry, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky 40506, USA
Yueh-Lin Loo
Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA
Mikko Haataja
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials (PRISM) and Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics (PACM), Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA
Recently, it has been demonstrated that solvent-vapor-induced crystallization of triethylsilylethynyl anthradithiophene (TES ADT) thin films can be directed on millimeter length scales along arbitrary paths by controlling local crystal growth rates via pre-patterning the substrate. Here, we study the influence of capillary effects on crystallization along such channels. We first derive an analytical expression for the steady-state growth front velocity as a function of channel width and validate it with numerical simulations. Then, using data from TES ADT guided crystallization experiments, we extract a characteristic channel width, which provides the smallest feature size that can be obtained by this technique.
