Surface chemical and mechanical properties of plasma-polymerized N-isopropylacrylamide.

Surface-immobilized poly(N-isopropyl acrylamide) (pNIPAM) is currently used for a wide variety of biosensor and biomaterial applications. A thorough characterization of the surface properties of pNIPAM thin films will benefit those applications. In this work, we present analysis of a plasma-polymerized NIPAM (ppNIPAM) coating by multiple surface analytical techniques, including time-of-flight secondary-ion mass spectrometry (ToF-SIMS), contact angle measurement, atomic force microscopy (AFM), and sum frequency generation (SFG) vibrational spectroscopy.