Fabrication of Hierarchically Converging Polymer Nanofibers via Liquid Crystal-Templated Chemical Vapor Polymerization and Their Mathematical Modeling via Graph Theoretical Analysis

The presence of fibrous arrays on the surfaces of the biological systems often provides essential functions such as adhesion properties of gecko setae, absorption of nutrients by intestinal villi, and propulsion of cilia on microorganisms. There have been attempts to mimic the structures of arrayed fibers via fabrication techniques (e.g., microcontact printing, 3D printing, and hydrothermal growth) enabling their applications as a sensor for fluid biopsy, superhydrophobic surface, and microneedles for monitoring biomedical signals. Recent trends in complex nanostructures engineering have started to demand diverse structural and chemical modulations. In this context, templated chemical vapor polymerization (CVP) into a liquid crystalline (LC) film has gained attention as a promising technique that can tailor the chemical and topological features of the nanofibers array on the surfaces. Tunable aspects of templated nanofibers enabled interesting features such as chirality, photoluminescence, and programmed response to external stimulus. Although the opportunities for LC-templated CVP are underway, it is still elusive how the nanofibers grow within the LC phase. By observing the intermediate structures of the nanostructures, we discover the growth sequences of the templated nanofibers and provide mathmatical modelling to describe their growth. We ran computational analysis (StructuralGT) that employs graph theory to mathmatically translate the hierarchical features and fitted our model into empirical results.