Vacuum deposition films of oxadiazole compounds: formation and structure investigation

The search for alternative routes of organic thin film formation is stimulated by the outstanding properties of these films in such fields as nonlinear optics, photonic data processing and molecular electronics. The formation of highly ordered multilayer structures by thermal vacuum deposition (VD) of organic compounds is an essential step toward the application of supramolecular organic architectures in technical systems. The VD of an amphiphilic substituted 2,5-diphenylene-1,3,4-oxadiazole 1 onto silicon substrates at defined temperature was used for the formation of ultrathin films. The structural data obtained for the VD-films of oxadiazole 1 by means of X-ray reflectivity, X-ray grazing incidence diffraction and atomic force microscopy (AFM) investigations indicate the formation of well ordered oxadiazole multilayers. The structure of the VD-multilayers is compared with that of Langmuir–Blodgett (LB) films and thermally treated LB-multilayers prepared from the same compound.