New method for fast morphological characterization of organic polycrystalline films by polarized optical microscopy

A new method to visualize the large-scale crystal grain morphology of organic polycrystalline films is proposed. First, optical anisotropic transmittance images of polycrystalline zinc phthalocyanine (ZnPc) films vacuum deposited by weak epitaxial growth (WEG) method were acquired with polarized optical microscopy (POM). Then morphology properties including crystal grain size, distribution, relative orientation, and crystallinity were derived from these images by fitting with a transition dipole model. At last, atomic force microscopy (AFM) imaging was carried out to confirm the fitting and serve as absolute references. This method can be readily generalized to other organic polycrystalline films, thus providing an efficient way to access the large-scale morphologic properties of organic polycrystalline films, which may prove to be useful in industry as a film quality monitoring method.