Session N7 - Monolayers and Multilayers: Agnes Pockels and Katharine Blodgett.
INVITED session, Wednesday morning, March 24
516C, Palais des Congres
While working at the General Electric Research Laboratories in 1934, Katharine Blodgett published a brief account (in JACS) of her success at transferring layers of fatty acids from the water surface to a glass plate layer-by-layer; creating what was arguably the first rationally-designed nanostructured material. These structures would come bear her name along with that of her mentor, Irving Langmuir. Although various commercial applications have been proposed, ranging from anti-reflection coatings to soft X-ray monochromators, Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) films have never truly found their way into the marketplace in a significant way. Nevertheless, the scientific interest in LB films remains strong after 70 years because the technique offers a controlled method for building supermolecular assemblies with well-defined molecular arrangement and orientation. LB films have proven extremely useful as a research tool in order to explore fundamental interactions of amphiphilic molecules, chemical reactions in confined geometries, and to create model systems to calibrate and challenge new experimental techniques. From a statistical physics standpoint, LB films offer the possibility of studying the evolution of structure and phase transitions as a molecular system evolves from two to three dimensions. LB methods are also frequently used to create model biological membranes of known composition as well as molecular (or nanoparticle) layers for studies of potential nanoscale optoelectronic devices.