Abstract
The design and preparation of functional bolaamphiphile-based composite films are of key importance for application in a wide variety of fields. This study demonstrates a new approach to constructing composite films by the Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) method using a fluorine-containing bola-type diacid derivative with different metal ions. The bola-type molecule we used could be spread on water surfaces and metal ion subphases to fabricate various nanostructured ultrathin films. The obtained data demonstrated that the employed metal ions, including Ag(I), Cu(II), and Eu(III) ions in subphase solutions, can regulate the organized molecular stacking and form interfacial nanostructures deposited in LB films. It was found that the interfacial coordinating interactions can easily occur between carboxyl groups in a molecular skeleton with metal ions in the formed composite films. The formation of composite films was confirmed by changes in the surface pressure-area isotherms, morphologies, and spectra of the transferred LB films. While various research works have achieved the regulation of functions and nanostructures of sophisticated bola-type compounds, we here demonstrate a simple routine to modulate the nanostructures and organized packing of bola-type compounds composite films by changing the metal ions in subphase solutions.
Highlights
Bolaamphiphiles, which include two functional headgroups generally connected by some alkyl chains [1,2,3,4,5,6,7], have attracted much attention due to their special chemical and interfacial behaviors in different self-assembled nanostructures [8,9,10]
Some bola-type diacid compounds with an alkyl spacer could react with metal ions to obtain new nanostructures in organized films [38]
It should be noted that the surface pressure from the FA-Cu composite Langmuir film showed a sharp increment with an extrapolating molecular area of 0.21 nm2 /molecule and a maximum pressure value of 47 mN/m, which indicated that the formed FA-Cu composite films showed more stable characteristics than the other two composite films
Summary
Bolaamphiphiles, which include two functional headgroups generally connected by some alkyl chains [1,2,3,4,5,6,7], have attracted much attention due to their special chemical and interfacial behaviors in different self-assembled nanostructures [8,9,10]. Different from typical amphiphilic compounds, bola-type molecules demonstrate changeable conformations at different interfacial situations [11,12,13]. These properties make them extremely suitable for applications in in nanotechnology, electronics, and gene and drug delivery [14,15,16,17,18]. The air/water interface can provide a good environment for many molecules/building blocks to construct supramolecular assemblies in a controlled manner [19,20,21,22]. Some bola-type diacid compounds with an alkyl spacer could react with metal ions to obtain new nanostructures in organized films [38]
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