Applications of confinement effects

While our primary focus is on fundamental questions of confinement effect, we also explore ways to exploit the effect for applications. In an early work, we demonstrated that fluctuation-induced spinodal dewetting can be exploited to produce micrometer groove patterns (Fig. 5) ^{14, 15}. Recently, we demonstrated the ability to design polymer films with controllable T_g– ¹⁶ and ƞ_­eff– ¹⁷ confinement effects. Currently, we are working on the use of confinement effect to enhance the performance of stretchable electronic polymers.