Back Cover: Effect of solvent evaporation on the self‐assembly of poly(3‐hexylthiophene‐2,5‐diyl) and on the film morphology during electrospray deposition (Phys. Status Solidi RRL 2/2014)

Abstract

Electrospray deposition (ESD) is a widely used solution process which employs electric force to transform a liquid into a thin film through the formation of fine liquid droplets. In their Letter on pp. 154–157, Liao et al. demonstrate that the high-voltage rectangular pulse driven ESD can provide a way to probe the effect of solvent evaporation on the evaporation-induced self-assembly of poly(3-hexyl¬thiophene-2,5-diyl) (P3HT) in slow motion during deposition process. The self-assembly of P3HT molecules was correlated with the evaporation of the residual solvent during the pulse interval and reflected in their absorption spectra through better resolved vibronic sidebands. With an appropriate combination of pulse amplitude and pulse interval, the ESD can produce a P3HT thin film of high chain ordering. All of these findings not only help us to gain insight into the ESD process, but also promote the application of ESD to the fabrication of semiconductor devices with a reasonable processing speed.