Local and Average Glass Transitions in Polymer Thin Films

In the companion paper (DOI 10.1021/ma101098d), we presented a quantitative theory for the suppression of the glass transition in a thin polymer film. Our delayed glassification (DG) model follows a proposal by de Gennes that free volume can be transmitted from surface to film interior via kinks transported along molecular strands or loops. In this paper, we use the DG model to predict the effects of molecular weight and film thickness on the...