Camille Bishop, Department of Chemical Engineering, Wayne State University

Well-controlled phase separation in organic thin films is essential to their application in devices such as organic photovoltaics, thermoelectrics, and flexible electronics. One way to induce phase separation in thin films is by vapor depositing and quenching the order in a non-equilibrium state. Quantifying the deposited structure in these materials can be difficult, however, as the small amount of contrast between two organic components, especially in thin films, can lead to low signal-to-noise for many common measurements.

In this talk, I will discuss methods to manipulate phase separation in a completely amorphous vapor-deposited glass, as well as characterizing the resulting film morphology using a suite of real-space and reciprocal-space measurement techniques, including photo-induced force microscopy (PiFM), which combines the topographic sensitivity of AFM with the chemical sensitivity of highly localized IR measurements. I will introduce our work on using Resonant Soft X-ray Scattering, or RSoXS, to measure the structure of multi-component organic films with chemical and orientational sensitivity. Further, I will discuss computational analysis frameworks using the NIST RSoXS Simulation Suite (NRSS), a GPU-accelerated scattering simulator, to enhance the information content of RSoXS measurements. Through this work, I will demonstrate how real-space and reciprocal-space methods can be combined to fully model the morphology of thin, multi-component organic films.