Nanopatterned surfaces are of central importance to a variety of areas and applications, such as computer chip architectures, tissue interfacing, biosensors, light management and plasmonics, among others. Typically, the various approaches to nanopatterning of surfaces, including silicon, are broken into two major classes: top-down methods such as photolithography, e-beam lithography and scanning force microscopy variants, and bottom-up synthetic techniques, including self-assembly. Since lithography is the single most expensive step in computer chip manufacturing, the use of self-assembled block copolymers (BCPs) templates on surfaces is being seriously considered by the semiconductor industry to pattern sub-20 nm features on a semiconductor surface; the Industry Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) terms this approach ‘directed self-assembly’, or DSA. Here, we will describe the remarkable versatility of using BCPs, polymers that contain sufficient chemical information to form highly ordered templates over large areas. Recently, the experimental observation of what are termed static distortion waves (SDWs) [also referred to as mass distortion waves (MDWs)] that are local chiral twisting of lattices, has become a topic of extreme interest in the area of 2D-based materials - perfect timing as the discovery of SDWs/MDWs in block copolymer-based self-assembled structures that are at least an order of magnitude larger in scale serve as an easily studied and tailored model for these motifs on 2D materials.

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Scheme 1. Left: van Gogh’s Starry Night. Right: Chiral standing/mass distortion waves produced via self-assembly of block copolymers on a silicon surface.