Is there a general compensation rule governing the relaxation dynamics of polymeric surface patterns?

Understanding the mechanism and decay kinetics of patterned polymeric surfaces is a pertinent issue in nanotechnology. Herein, we present the relaxation behaviour of nanoparticle-brush filled imprinted and wrinkled polymer films showing similar compensation effect. Entropy-enthalpy compensation (EEC) effect signifies a linear correlation between the activation parameters of a relaxation process and is routinely observed in the relaxation dynamics of many condensed materials such as molecular additives and glass-forming materials. For the first time, we experimentally observed a full mapped out transition of pattern decay kinetics as a function of temperature (below and above the glass transition of the matrix) and additive concentration by utilizing decay of polymeric surface wrinkles. We observe EEC effect for an athermal and a favorable interacting composite system, thereby ensuring the robustness of the observed phenomenon. As a consequence of this compensation effect, relaxation kinetics for composite wrinkled films is faster than the neat polymer film below the characteristic compensation temperature, T_comp and faster above the T_comp. EEC proves itself to be the underlying mechanism for patterned polymer decay, governing the kinetics of any polymeric surface with patterns.