Abstract
Tailoring the polymer–metal interface is crucial for advanced material design. Vacuum deposition methods for metal layer coating are widely used in industry and research. They allow for installing a variety of nanostructures, often making use of the selective interaction of the metal atoms with the underlying polymer thin film. The polymer thin film may eventually be nanostructured, too, in order to create a hierarchy in length scales. Grazing incidence X-ray scattering is an advanced method to characterize and investigate polymer–metal interfaces. Being non-destructive and yielding statistically relevant results, it allows for deducing the detailed polymer–metal interaction. We review the use of grazing incidence X-ray scattering to elucidate the polymer–metal interface, making use of the modern synchrotron radiation facilities, allowing for very local studies via in situ (so-called “stop-sputter”) experiments as well as studies observing the nanostructured metal nanoparticle layer growth in real time.
Highlights
In our modern information society, electronic devices based on polymer-metal-composites are increasing in relevance due to their high performance, flexibility and low-cost production
The optoelectronic and chemical properties of these cluster configurations, and their technological applications, strongly depend on the size and distance of the clusters on the surface. It is necessary for an efficient and controlled production of such active nanostructured surfaces by sputter deposition to understand how the growth kinetics at the polymer–metal interface affects the morphology of the cluster assemblies
In order to give a brief overview of grazing incidence small-angle X-ray scattering (GISAXS), we introduce in this paragraph the basic ideas
Summary
In our modern information society, electronic devices based on polymer-metal-composites are increasing in relevance due to their high performance, flexibility and low-cost production. Putting both material classes together, a large variety of different functional morphologies on different length scales can be addressed by using diverse polymer thin films as templates for metal deposition, e.g., metal nanoparticles, nanorods and ramified nanostructures as coating or embedded in a polymer matrix These polymer-metal-nanocomposites represent a broad spectrum of attractive applications [46] as inexpensive and flexible organic photovoltaics (OPV) [76,77,78,79,80,81], organic light emitting diodes [82,83], organic field effect transistors [84,85] and sensors [86,87,88,89,90]. The review concludes with an outlook of future research directions in the field of polymer–metal interfaces
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