Thin organic films by atmospheric-pressure ion deposition

Abstract

Interest in thin films of functional organic materials has increased enormously in recent years because of the wide range of possible applications. Here we report an experimental setup for processing various organic materials into thin structured films under atmospheric pressure. The technique is based on an electrospray process. Microdroplets are initially formed and dried, generating ions that are extracted by electrostatic lenses. Thin structured films are then produced by the deposition of the resulting ion beam onto a moveable target. The technique offers several interesting features, including precise control of film thicknesses. We have also made experiments to investigate structured deposition, this being the first step towards the production of thin films where in all three dimensions the chemical composition can be chosen at will. This might provide a simple approach towards creating thin structured films and composites that are currently unattainable.

Organic solid‐state integrated amplifiers and lasers

“…Thin film deposition technology is the main tool for development of such integrated sources, aiming at forming a waveguiding layer of the gain medium on a substrate of lower refractive index. There is a wealth of methods that can be applied to form organic layers, including, thermal sublimation, solution inkjet printing [42], electrostatic layer-by-layer self-assembly [43], plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition [44], pulsed laser deposition (PLD) [45], matrix-assisted pulsed laser evaporation [46], atmospheric-pressure ion deposition [47] and electrospray deposition [48]. Amongst these film deposition techniques the prevailing ones are solution processing and thermal sublimation and have also been successfully www.lpr-journal.org…”

<em>In Situ</em> SIMS and IR Spectroscopy of Well-defined Surfaces Prepared by Soft Landing of Mass-selected Ions

“…Recent efforts have indicated potential future applications of soft landing of mass-selected ions in the preparation of peptide and protein arrays for use in high-throughput biological screening 7,8 , separation of proteins and conformational enrichment of peptides [9][10][11][12] , covalent attachment of peptides to surfaces 9,10,13,14 , chiral enrichment of organic compounds 15 , electrochemical characterization of specific redox-active proteins [16][17][18] , production of thin molecular films 19,20 , processing of macromolecules such as graphene 21 and preparation of model catalyst systems through soft landing of ionic clusters [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39] , nanoparticles [40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48] and organometallic complexes onto support materials 19,…”

Focused Electrospray Deposition for Matrix-assisted Laser Desorption/Ionization Mass Spectrometry

“…15 To this end, we need to focus charged droplets onto a spot under atmospheric pressure. A number of electrostatic lens assemblies have been reported to date for collimating charged droplets from electrospray ionization (ESI) source: [23][24][25][26][27] An ion funnel 23 collimates ions under vacuum after passing through a sampling capillary. A venturi device increases the transmission efficiency of ions through a sampling orifice under atmospheric pressure.…”

“…24,25 Recently, an electrostatic ion optics has been assembled to fabricate thin structured film on a solid substrate. 26,27 Nevertheless, an atmospheric ion focusing device for ES deposition has rarely been applied to the MALDI sample preparation. Here, we report the focused electrospray (FES) deposition of sample on a MALDI target plate under atmospheric pressure.…”