Spectrally Selective Imaging of Phase Separations in Multicomponent Polymer Films

Understanding the kinetics of phase separations in multicomponent polymer systems has a variety of applications ranging from molecular biology to material engineering. Polymer blend films provide a convenient way to model these processes in a quasi-2-dimensional system, allowing for use of imaging techniques focused on a single plane. The binary case of two polymers or polymers in a solvent has been explored in previous literature, but common experimental methods of observing phase separations in real time pose challenges under the addition of more components. Here we present a method of tracking phase length scales in real time using spectrally selective imaging to single out components of multicomponent films undergoing phase separations.