Characterization of the dynamics of block copolymer microdomains with local morphological measures
This article was first published in Physical Review E. Copyright 2008 American Physical Society (APS). It can be found at this URL: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevE.77.051805.
Abstract
We investigate the structure formation in thin films of cylinder forming block copolymers. With in situ scanning probe microscopy image sequences can be recorded with high temporal (2 min per frame) and spatial (10 nm) resolution. We compare different image processing methods for quantitative analysis of the large amount of data. Computing local Minkowski functionals yields local geometrical and morphological information about the observed structures and enables us to track their evolution with time. An alternative characterization method is to reduce the gray scale images to their skeleton and to classify and count the branching points of the skeletonized structure. We tracked the temporal evolution of these measures and computed correlation functions.