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In the latest issue of Advanced Materials, Costantini and co-workers report on the fabrication of inverted crystalline membranes of sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) by depositing clusters of these amphiphilic molecules on solid substrates. The films were generated by electrospray ion deposition which is a versatile method for the vacuum growth of molecular species that are not compatible with conventional thermal sublimation. Due to the electrospray process, SDS clusters in vacuum adopt an inverse micelle configuration with the hydrophobic part of the molecule forming a shell around the ionic core. These clusters are soft-landed on copper and silicon substrates and aggregate to form stable and homogenous multilayered films which maintain an inverted membrane configuration. Due to hydrophobic interactions, it is impossible to obtain such a configuration in the usual water-based processing of SDS molecules. This study paves the way for a chemically controlled vacuum growth of novel thin films based on nonvolatile materials such as polymers, proteins or coordination compounds.

Read the paper at DOI: 10.1002/adma.201104790