Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mphil-in-micro-and-nanotechnology-enterprise-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2023/paper-2/section-a-i/14/ii/solution

The gas impingement flux onto a surface follows from the normal component of the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution:
Here and , giving
Assume a conventional monolayer density and unit sticking coefficient. The incident-monolayer time is
Thus a few milliseconds is the usual contamination-time estimate at this pressure.
The assumed molecular footprint matters: neither nor the sticking coefficient is specified. More generally if the sticking probability is and desorption is negligible. Water can desorb rapidly from clean graphene at room temperature, so the incident-monolayer estimate does not establish that a stable, complete water layer actually forms in that time. Residues and defects can increase local adsorption.

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