Annealing assisted structural and surface morphological changes in Langmuir–Blodgett films of nickel octabutoxy phthalocyanine

• Langmuir–Blodgett (LB) films of phthalocyanine subjected to thermal annealing.
• Structural transformation and coexistence of polymorphs in LB films
• Surface morphology changes from nanoscale grains to elongated crystallites.
• Reduction of fractal dimension and circularity index reveals asymmetric growth.

We report our studies on thin films of metallo-phthalocyanine (MPc), Nickel(II)1,4,8,11,15,18,22,25-octabutoxy-29H,31H-phthalocyanine (NiPc(OBu)8) transferred in a well defined thermodynamic state over a self assembled monolayer (octadecyl trichlorosilane)/SiO2/Si substrate using the Langmuir–Blodgett (LB) method. The films are characterized using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), grazing incidence X-ray diffraction (GIXD) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) techniques. DSC studies on powdered samples in the bulk indicate enantiotropic solid–solid phase transition. GIXD studies on the as-deposited LB film show a Bragg peak indicating crystallinity of the thin film. Annealing (373 K) results in reduction of lattice spacing (1.21 Å) signifying changes in molecular packing within the unit cell. At this stage, an additional Bragg peak is observed which grows at the expense of the former one and they coexist between 373 K and 423 K. A discontinuity in lattice spacing from 20.73 to 15.12 Å with annealing indicates clearly a structural change of the underlying crystalline lattice. Correspondingly, the surface morphology images obtained using AFM show, with annealing, a transformation from spherical granular morphology to elongated, flat crystallites suggesting asymmetric growth process. Statistical parameters of the grain extracted from the AFM images show that the size, fractal dimension and circularity are affected by annealing. Based on these studies, we infer the structural and surface morphological changes of the meta-stable phase (Form I) to the stable phase (Form II) in annealed LB films of phthalocyanine.