Understanding surfaces and buried interfaces of polymer materials at the molecular level using sum frequency generation vibrational spectroscopy

This paper reviews recent progress in the studies on polymer surfaces/interfaces using sum frequency generation (SFG) vibrational spectroscopy. SFG theory, technique, and some experimental details have been presented. The review is focused on the SFG studies on buried interfaces involving polymer materials, such as polymer-water interfaces and polymer-polymer interfaces. Molecular interactions between polymer surfaces and adhesion promoters as well as biological molecules such as proteins and peptides have also been elucidated using SFG. This review demonstrates that SFG is a powerful technique to characterize molecular level structural information of complicated polymer surfaces and interfaces in situ. (C) 2006 Society of Chemical Industry.