Past exam of the MPhil in micro- and nanotechnology enterprise course of the University of Cambridge / 2018 / Paper 1 / Section B / 9 / i / a / Solution

Use a self-assembled monolayer of an alkanethiol with a polar terminal group, such as $\mathrm{HS}(\mathrm{C}{\mathrm{H}}_2{)}_{\mathrm{n}}\mathrm{OH}$. Sulfur anchors to gold while the exposed hydroxyl groups interact favorably with water. A methyl-terminated monolayer would instead present a low-polarity outer surface and usually retain hydrophobic character.

Prepare a clean gold surface, allow adsorption from a compatible clean solution, and rinse away unbound material. Dense coverage and molecular ordering help make the terminal chemistry reproducible. Mixed chain lengths or incomplete coverage can change the wetting response, so the presence of an OH group in the bottle alone is not sufficient. An original experiment demonstrated hydrophilic hydroxyl-terminated films and showed that mixing chain lengths changed surface order and wettability.^[ref]

This specifies the resulting interface rather than treating every freshly prepared gold surface as intrinsically identical: contamination, preparation and adsorbates influence the starting contact angle.