Ultra thin polymer films fabricated with the self-assembly technique

Ultra-thin films comprising alternating layers of polyacids, poly(styrene sulfonate) (PSS) or poly(vinyl sulfonic)-acids (PVS) and doped poly(o-methoxyaniline) (POMA) were produced using the self-assembly (SA) technique. The combination of POMA and polyacids is of particular interest, for the polyacid may prevent the POMA from undoping when the film is exposed to neutral or slightly basic solutions. Doped poly(o-alkoxyanilines) are suitable systems for SA because of their high solubility in water. The UV-visible absorbance spectra show a peak ranging from 585 nm to 800 nm depending on the doping level. The absorbance at the peak increases linearly with the number of deposited bi-layers, which indicates that equal amounts of material are adsorbed in each deposition procedure