Reverse engineering of polymeric multilayers using AFM-based nanoscale IR spectroscopy and thermal analysis

摘要

Introduction The identification of unknown multilayer samples is quite similar to solving a Sudoku number puzzle, in which the final solution is deduced from stitching together bits of information in a coherent manner.Often, extraction of such data from ultra-thin layers(<5μm) is limited due to either the diffraction limit, in the case of mid-infrared radiation, or the requirement of having a significant amount of material for thermal analysis(TA).Typically, current analytical procedures call for stripping of material by extracting the layers chemically or "peeling" off each layer one-by-one prior to applying the aforementioned analytical techniques.The researcher will then need to reconstruct the information piece-by-piece.Moreover, a great deal of information can potentially be lost or misidentified inadvertently should one of those layers be too thin to be detected.