Development of novel surfactant-templated nanostructured thin SiO2, and SiO2–TiO2 films

Nanostructured oxidic thin films are of interest due to their applicability in many different fields like filtration technology, catalysis, biomaterials and self purification. In this paper, we present sol–gel derived SiO2 and SiO2–TiO2 thin films with a new fingerprint-like nanostructure. The films were produced by dip-coating glass slides into the sol and a temperature treatment at 500 and 600 °C. The characterization methods were FEGSEM and AFM. The dimensions of the nanostructured surface pattern were calculated from the AFM data with the power spectral density method.