Self-Assembled Monolayers
Document Type
Book Contribution
Publication Date
1-1-2010
Description
Self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) are ordered monomolecular films of an organic species that organize spontaneously on a substrate (Ulman 1996, Chaki 2001, Schreiber 2004, Love et al. 2005). The great and growing attention paid to these composites is motivated by their interest as prototypical organic-inorganic interfaces, but chiefly by the wide variety of their applications, most of them in the field of nanotechnology. SAMs are nanosystems, as they have at least one nanoscopic dimension. In the most thoroughly studied case of organic molecules attached to a planar surface, this dimension is the thickness of the film, which is usually 1-3 nm. Metal, metal oxide, and semiconductor surfaces have been used as SAM substrates. However, SAMs can assemble on surfaces of any shape or size, and many currently active projects related to SAM research involve monolayers deposited on nanoparticles (e.g., Doellefeld et al. 2002, Berry and Curtis 2004, Antolini et al. 2007), and thus deal with objects confined to the nanoscale in all three dimensions.
Citation Information
Hagelberg, Frank. 2010. Self-Assembled Monolayers. Handbook of Nanophysics: Functional Nanomaterials. 17-1. ISBN: 9781420075533,9781420075526