Langmuir-Blodgett transfer from the oil-water interface

Hypothesis: Almost all Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) films were prepared with the classical Langmuir film bal-ance, developed more than a century ago. To date, the success of the classical Langmuir film balance and the LB transfer technique is primarily restricted to the study of self-assembled monolayers at the air -water surface. It is challenging to study self-assembled monolayers at the oil-water interface, since the Langmuir film balance requires stacked oil and water layers. We hypothesize that a newly developed experimental method, called constrained drop surfactometry (CDS), is capable of preparing and charac-terizing LB films from the oil-water interface. Experiments: We have developed a novel droplet-based LB transfer technique capable of preparing LB films from the oil-water interface. In conjunction with atomic force microscopy, we have demonstrated the capacity of the CDS in studying a natural pulmonary surfactant film self-assembled at the perfluorocarbon-water interface, and have compared to the LB films prepared from the air-water surface using the classical Langmuir film balance.Findings: Our findings have demonstrated a novel paradigm for studying self-assembled monolayers and for preparing LB films from the oil-water interface. The CDS holds great promise for expanding the appli-cability of the traditional LB transfer technique from the air-water surface to the oil-water interface.(c) 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

Recently, the study of Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) films has been primarily focused on self-assembled monolayers at the air-water surface, with limited research on the oil-water interface. This study introduces a new experimental method called constrained drop surfactometry (CDS) for preparing and characterizing LB films from the oil-water interface.