Thermally activated dewetting of organic thin films: the case of pentacene on SiO2 and gold

The morphology of pentacene organic thin films deposited on SiO2 and Au(111) surfaces using organic molecular beam deposition (OMBD) has been characterized by a multi-technique approach. Among the techniques applied were X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), atomic force microscopy (AFM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and thermal desorption spectroscopy (TDS). Our rather detailed studies reveal that on both substrates the growth is strongly influenced by dewetting and islanding phenomena, yielding very rough surfaces. Surprisingly, substantial changes in the morphology were observed also after deposition on room-temperature samples on a time scale of several hours. The rather extensive set of in situ XPS data was analyzed in the framework of a simple model, which allows us to derive rather detailed information on the roughness parameters.