Mapping Mechanical Properties and Glass Transition Temperature in Polymer Materials with sub-100 nm Resolution

Thermomechanical properties at the nanoscale are extremely important for understanding fundamental as well as technological problems. To date, Local Thermal Analysis (LTA) provides information about glass transition and melting temperature with about 1-2 $\mu$m spatial resolution. We developed LTA technique based on Scanning Probe Microscopy that allows probing not only melting and glass transition temperatures, but also elastic and loss moduli on a 100 nanometer length scale. This universal method for quantitative thermomechanical analysis was used to study the kinetics of phase separation in PMMA:SAN system. The maps of mechanical properties as function of temperature were obtained with sub-100 nm resolution. The difference of mechanical properties for two materials was determined.