Progress In Conducting Polymer Deposition

The project leader Luke Hanley reports: "Basically, the way it works is you have a surface upon which you want to grow a thin film. You put that into a vacuum chamber, pump all the air out, and you simultaneously deposit charged ions on to the surface and evaporate neutral molecules onto the surface. These ions and neutrals meet at the surface and form this continuous polymeric film."

He adds: "Weve been able to show we can control the chemistry and shape of the surface on a nanometer scale. It allows you to control what this thin film is on the sub-nanometer scale."

Initial experiments with thiophene ions failed to produce a conducting polymer called polythiophene as hoped. They "formed something" but Hanley says "it wasnt an interesting polythiophene. So we brought in both an ion beam and neutral beam at the surface."

Hanley modified a commercial ion source to work with organic material such as thiophene. We can put organic molecules into it and get out the types of ions that we want. We can actually grow large areas of films fairly quickly by this method. Were not quite at manufacturing scale yet, but weve demonstrated that we know how to get to that point."

The groups is now exploring other different film properties using the technique with hopes for creating a whole class of conducting polymers.