"BIOINSPIRED" INORGANIC FILM GROWTH AT ORGANIC TEMPLATES
Abstract
Many living organisms grow crystalline inorganic components (usually to add mechanical strength, but also for sensing and other applications). These organisms exert a high degree of control not just over the crystal orientation but also over the structure and composition of the crystals. They do this in wet environments, without the use of ultrahigh vacuum. There have been efforts to mimic this process in the laboratory by growing minerals under floating (Langmuir) monolayers, which serve as ordered organic templates. We have studied such processes using grazing-incidence X-ray diffraction to determine the structure of both organic and inorganic films during deposition. These studies illustrate that some of the same phenomena familiar to surface scientists working in UHV occur also in "real world" environments.
