Study of the packing density and molecular orientation of bimolecular self-assembled monolayers of aromatic and aliphatic organosilanes on silica

Bimolecular self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of aromatic and aliphatic chlorosilanes were self-assembled onto silica, and their characteristics were established by contact angle measurement, near-edge X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. Three aromatic constituents (phenyltrichlorosilane, benzyltrichlorosilane, and phenethyltrichlorosilane) were studied in combination with four aliphatic coadsorbates (butyltrichlorosilane, butyldimethylchlorosilane, octadecyltrichlorosilane, and octadecyldimethylchlorosilane). Our results demonstrate that whereas SAMs made of trichlorinated organosilanes are densely packed, SAMs prepared from monochlorinated species are less dense and poorly ordered. In mixed systems, trichlorinated aromatics and trichlorinated aliphatics formed SAMs with highly tunable compositions; their surfaces were compositionally homogeneous with no large-scale domain separation. The homogeneous nature of the resulting SAM was a consequence of the formation of in-plane siloxane linkages among neighboring molecules. In contrast, when mixing monochlorinated aliphatics with trichlorinated aromatics, molecular segregation occurred. Although the two shortest aromatic species did not display significant changes in orientation upon mixing with aliphatics, the aromatic species with the longest polymethylene spacer, phenethyltrichlorosilane, displayed markedly different orientation behavior in mixtures of short- and long-chain aliphatics.