Dresden 2006 – scientific programme

Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Downloads | Help

CPP: Chemische Physik und Polymerphysik

CPP 23: POSTER Functional Organic Thin Films

CPP 23.29: Poster

Thursday, March 30, 2006, 17:00–19:00, P2

Toward the fabrication of a monomolecular insulator film — •Michael Zharnikov, Yian Tai, Hiroyuki Noda, Andrey Shaporenko, and Michael Grunze — Angewandte Physikalische Chemie, Universität Heidelberg, Im Neuenheimer Feld 253, Heidelberg

Progress in fabricating smaller and more efficient structures in electronic and spintronic devices depends on better dielectric materials for nanofabrication. A perspective nanoinsulator is a molecular thin organic film - self-assembled monolayer (SAM), which provide an alternative to commonly used oxide dielectrics. A so far unresolved technological problem for insulator applications of SAMs is the difficulty of fabricating stable metal layers on their surfaces, i.e. at the SAM-ambient interface. Such a film is generally leaky for metal adsorbates, which makes it impossible to integrate it into a multilayer assembly (e.g. in a tunnel junction magnetic memory cell) or to fabricate metal electrodes on its surface (e.g. in an organic thin film transistor). Using nickel as a test metal adsorbate and several different substituted and non-substituted SAMs as test substrates, we show that this difficulty can be overcome by the combination of a special design of the SAM constituents and their extensive cross-linking by low-energy electron irradiation. The properties of the SAM insulator and the metal overlayer were monitored by several complementary experimental techniques, including X-ray absorption spectroscopy and electrochemical measurements. The approach represents an important step toward the technological applications of monomolecular dielectric layers.