Photoinitiated chemical vapor deposition of polymeric thin films using a volatile photoinitiator.

Photoinitiated chemical vapor deposition (piCVD) is an evolutionary CVD technique for depositing polymeric thin films in one step without using any solvents. The technique requires no pre- or post-treatment and uses a volatile photoinitiator to initiate free-radical polymerization of gaseous monomers under UV irradiation. Glycidyl methacrylate (GMA) was used as a test monomer for its ability to undergo free-radical polymerization, and 2,2'-azobis(2-methylpropane) (ABMP) was used as the photoinitiator, as it is known to produce radicals when excited by photons. GMA and ABMP vapors were fed into a vacuum chamber in which film growth was observed on a substrate exposed to UV irradiation. The resulting poly(glycidyl methacrylate) (PGMA) thin films were comprised of linear chains and had high structural resemblance to conventionally polymerized PGMA, as shown by the high solubility in tetrahydrofuran and the infrared and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy measurements. The introduction of ABMP into the vacuum chamber significantly increased growth rates. The maximum growth rate achieved was approximately 140 nm/min and represents a 7-fold enhancement over the case without ABMP. The molecular weight was found to increase with increasing monomer-to-initiator (M/I) feed ratio, and the polydispersity indexes (PDIs) of the samples were between 1.8 and 2.2, lower than the values obtained in conventional batch polymerization but in agreement with the theoretical expressions developed for low-conversion solution-phase polymerization, which are applicable to continuous processes such as piCVD. Molecular-weight distributions can be narrowed by filtering out wavelengths shorter than 300 nm, which induce branching and/or cross-linking. The strong dependence of the molecular weight on the M/I ratio, the rate enhancement due to the use of a radical photoinitiator, the good agreement between the experimental, and the theoretical PDIs provide evidence of a free-radical mechanism in piCVD. The clear films obtained in this work had number-average molecular weights between 12 500 and 97 000 g/mol. The similarities in growth conditions, growth rates, and molecular weights between the initiated CVD, a previously reported thermal process able to synthesize a wide range of polymers, and the piCVD of PGMA suggest that piCVD can also be used to produce those polymers and potentially others whose monomers undergo free-radical mechanisms. This paper serves as an introduction to the technique by demonstrating piCVD's ability in synthesizing high-molecular-weight PGMA thin films with narrow molecular-weight distributions from vapors of GMA and ABMP in a single, dry step under UV irradiation.