Structural properties of organic Langmuir-Blodgett thin films using atomic force microscopy

The Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) thin film deposition technique is an elegant method in thin film technology to fabricate ultra-thin organic LB films on the nanoscale. This technique allows us to make monolayer or multilayer ultra-thin LB films by sequentially transferring monolayers from a water surface onto a solid substrate. During the last decade many scientists have a significant interest in Langmuir-Blodgett films because of potential applications of such films, which have many potential applications in physics, chemistry, biology and molecular electronics. There are a number of techniques such as Atomic Force Microscopy, Surface Plasmon Resonance, X-ray diffraction, Infra-red and Raman Spectroscopy, Ellipsometry etc that can be used to characterise and evaluate the optical and structural information of monolayer and multilayer organic LB films. In this work organic materials have been used to fabricate an ultra-thin LB film using a computer controlled alternate layer Langmuir-Blodgett trough. Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) is employed to investigate the structural properties of such LB films. All results of the structural properties for organic ultra-thin LB films will be discussed in this paper