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The progress of organic electronics demands an increased participation of nanotechnology, and it has already been shown that the presence of metallic nanoparticles and/or nanostructured thin films can enhance the device performance. Nevertheless, to gain control over the device final performance, it is crucial to achieve a profound understanding of the nanostructure development and assembly. We investigate the growth kinetics of silver (Ag) on a tris(8-hydroxyquinolinato)aluminum (Alq3) thin film via sputter deposition. The increase of the average electron density of the Ag nanostructured film is observed to follow a sigmoidal shape development as a function of the deposited Ag thickness, as a consequence of dominant island-mediated growth. The nanoclustered film is percolated at around a thickness of 5.0 ± 0.1 nm. At this film thickness the effective film density is about 50%. Moreover, our simulation results indicate that the shape of the nanoclusters changes from truncated spheres to cylinders upon sur...

Carbon nanotube “forests” show great promise in a variety of applications, from supercapacitors to fuel cells, but the realization of such materials for functional devices relies on a better control over processing routes such that targeted structures and associated properties can be reproducibly obtained. The orientation distribution of the nanotubes is a critical structural property affecting both electrical and mechanical response, yet it remains a challenging characteristic to quantify. Small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) is a technique well suited to investigate the vertical alignment of nanotubes. Here we show that the orientation distribution obtained from SAXS is not satisfactorily represented by the normal distribution or the Lorentzian, which have been used until now. Instead, an excellent agreement between model and data is found with the generalized normal distribution (GND). Such quantification of the carbon nanotube alignment can be used as direct input in simulations for optimizing structur...