Abstract
Spectroscopic ellipsometry is increasingly used for investigation of biofilms and biological materials because of its non-invasive manner. In case of biofilms, the investigated material might be present on the surface only in small amounts forming an island-like coating. In this work we investigate the applicability of different ellipsometric models for such discontinuous biofilms. We used various types of peptides for which adhesion differences in the case of deposition to n- and p-type silicon were theoretically determined in [1]. Since the adhesion of these types of peptides to differently doped silicon significantly differs, resulting in selective deposition of peptides from liquid solutions, the applicability of the ellipsometric models can be tested sufficiently. [1] S. K. Ramakrishnan, M. Martin, T. Cloitre, L. Firlej, C. Gergely, Molecular Mechanism of Selective Binding of Peptides to Silicon Surface. J. Chem. Inf. Model. 54, 2117 (2014).