For the first time, a team of scientists including from DESY has succeeded in capturing in real time the first few milliseconds in the life of a gold coating as it forms on a polymer. The team used PETRA III to observe the earliest stages in the growth of a metal-polymer hybrid material as a film of gold was applied to a polymer carrier, in a process that can be used in industrial applications. The group’s research, which it presented now in the journal Nanoscale Horizons, not only offers important new insights into how innovative hybrid nanomaterials form, it also sets a new world record in the temporal resolution achieved using GISAXS, a surface-sensitive scattering technique.
Metal-polymer materials form the basis of modern flexible electronics, such as organic field effect transistors (OFET) or novel television screens (OLED). A detailed understanding of the manufacturing process is essential in order to manufacture such composites using smaller amounts of starting materials, to make them more energy-efficient and to be able to use them more flexibly.
Read more on the DESY website
Image: Experimental setup on beamline P03: The high-brilliance X-ray beam from PETRA III (magenta) is scattered by the surface structures while gold atoms are rapidly deposited on wafer-thin layers of plastic. The deflected X-ray light is recorded using a special high-speed camera designed at DESY. The sophisticated analysis of the real-time data obtained provides clues about the change in the sizes, distances and density profile of the resulting metal-polymer boundary layer
Credit: DESY/M. Schwartzkopf