Abstract
Herein is a study of the soft sputtering method, gas cluster ion sputtering (GCIS), and its effects on the atomic, morphologic, and band structure properties of polyaniline (PAni) as studied with X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry, atomic force microscopy, and scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS). The GCIS source used was a 1000 argon atom cluster with 4 keV energy, which resulted in a sputter yield of 3.4 ± 0.2 × 10−3 nm3 per argon atom. Soft ion sputtering reduced the sample by explicitly removing the oxidized contaminants as determined by surface sensitive techniques: XPS and Time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (TOF-SIMS). By the use of STS we found that by removing the oxidized components, an overall shift of electronic states occurred, transitioning the states closer to the Fermi edge by 0.3 V.
Highlights
Conductive polymers have an array of applications due to being organic semiconductors [1], which allow for simpler and less costly preparation methods compared to typical crystalline semiconductors
The samples were prepared in a similar manner as Abdulrazzaq et al [36]; a 5 by weight percent solution of 20 k Da emeraldine base polyaniline was dissolved in N-Methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP)
The slides were left in isopropyl alcohol (IPA) until the polymer was spin-coated onto the slides
Summary
Conductive polymers have an array of applications due to being organic semiconductors [1], which allow for simpler and less costly preparation methods compared to typical crystalline semiconductors. PAni has found applications as antistatic coatings [2], capacitors [3], anti-corrosion coatings [4,5], and molecular sensors [6,7]; for many of these operations, surface roughness and composition are critical. There have been a wide variety of methods that have been used to make PAni surfaces (with varying surface roughness), including evaporation deposition [8], spin coating [9], drop-casting [10], electrodeposition [11], and DC sputtering [6]. The lack of surface studies of conductive polymers is most likely due to the complexity of preparing such a sample for ultra-high vacuum measurements
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