Definition
The Brewster Angle Microscopy (BAM) is a method, which allows to study, through a microscope, the thickness and topography of thin films on dielectric substrate by recording the parallel polarized reflectance of the sample at the Brewster angle of the substrate.
The Imaging ellipsometry is a method, which allows to study, through a microscope, the thickness, refractive index, and topography of thin films on any substrate by analyzing the phase difference and the intensity ratio of the parallel and perpendicular polarized reflectance of the sample.
Principle
Brewster Angle Microscopy (BAM)
The BAM appears at the beginning of the 1990s (Henon and Meunier 1991; Hönig and Möbius 1991) and was principally developed to study Langmuir films. This method takes advantage of the reflectance property of the p-polarized light (parallel to the incidence plane) on a dielectric surface. Indeed,...
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References
Azzam RMA, Bashara NM (1987) Ellipsometry and polarized light. Elsevier, Amsterdam
Castano S, Delord B, Février A, Lehn JM, Lehn P, Desbat B (2009) Asymmetric lipid bilayer formation stabilized by DNA at the air/water interface. Biochimie 91(6):765–773
Henon S, Meunier J (1991) Microscope at the Brewster angle, direct observation of first order phase transitions in monolayers. Rev Sci Instr 62:936–939
Hönig D, Möbius D (1991) Direct visualization of monolayers at the air-water interface by Brewster angle microscopy. JPhysChem 95:4590–4592
Mascetti J, Castano S, Cavagnat D, Desbat B (2008) Organization of beta-cyclodextrin under pure cholesterol, DMPC or DMPG, and mixed cholesterol/phospholipid monolayers. Langmuir 24:9616–9622
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Desbat, B., Castano, S. (2020). Brewster Angle Microscopy and Imaging Ellipsometry. In: Roberts, G., Watts, A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Biophysics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35943-9_664-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35943-9_664-1
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