Image credit: Ming Lee Tang, Stefan Mannsfeld, Professor Zhenan Bao, Dept. of Chemical Engineering, Stanford University.

This striking image taken by Ming Lee Tang at Stanford University shows a very thin crystalline film composed of stacked “terraces” (a 45-nanometer-thick layer of an organic semiconducting compound, a fluorenethiophene-oligomer). First, Tang created the film by heating a powder form of the substance in a vacuum, which let the particles arrange themselves into this layered crystal. Then she took this image with an atomic force microscope in tapping mode.

This type of thin film is used in a microelectronic device called an organic thin film transistor. Organic thin film transistors can potentially be used in large area displays such as electronic billboards and in various types of sensors. And, unlike silicon-based thin film transistors, they can be constructed on flexible surfaces. This may well result in a new generation of portable computers and other electronic products, and might even lead to magazines that are essentially hand-held displays with content that can change or perhaps be animated.

The AFM image was made in order to analyze the quality of the film. According to Tang, “analyzing the shape and size of the terraces is crucial for understanding how to improve organic thin film transistors.”

 

To learn more about the tools used to create nanoscale images, go to the article Seeing Atoms.