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This thesis explores the fabrication of gyroid-forming block
copolymer templates and the optical properties of the resulting
gyroid optical metamaterials, significantly contributing to our
understanding of both. It demonstrates solvent vapour annealing to
improve the long-range order of the templates, and investigates the
unique crystallisation behaviour of their semicrystalline block.
Furthermore, it shows that gyroid optical metamaterials that
exhibit only short-range order are optically equivalent to
nanoporous gold, and that the anomalous linear dichroism of gyroid
optical metamaterials with long-range order is the result of the
surface termination of the bulk gyroid morphology. Optical
metamaterials are artificially engineered materials that, by virtue
of their structure rather than their chemistry, may exhibit various
optical properties not otherwise encountered in nature (e.g. a
negative refractive index). However, these structures must be
significantly smaller than the wavelength of visible light and are
therefore challenging to fabricate using traditional "top down"
techniques. Instead, a "bottom up" approach can be used, whereby
optical metamaterials are fabricated via templates created by the
self-assembly of block-copolymers. One such morphology is the
gyroid, a chiral, continuous and triply periodic cubic network
found in a range of natural and synthetic self-assembled systems.
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