Ultrathin Organic Multilayer Films Via Salt Formation: Easy Access To Tailor-made Coatings In The Thickness Range Of 1 Nm To 500 Nm

The state of the art technologies for the preparation of well defined ultrathin films in the submicron range are the Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) technique and self-assembly (SA) methods based on chemisorption [l]. Whereas the LBtechnique requires sophisticated apparatus and is generally limited to small film areas [2], the SA-methods are relatively simple [3,4], hut have not been employed for the preparation of films thicker than 8 layers ( 20nm) [4], probably due to the loss of chemical functionality. Our approach avoids these limits and extends the SA-concept by emploing salt formation as the driving force for the construction of multilayer supramolecular assemblies.