Multidentate Adsorbates for Self-Assembled Monolayer Films

The spontaneous adsorption of organic molecules on a variety of planar and nonplanar substrates, that is, self assembly, can generate films just one molecule thick. These nanoscale, self-assembled monolayer (SAM) films have been extensively used to engineer surfaces with well-defined properties. Their utility has been demonstrated in a wide range of applications, including wetting, adhesion, lubrication, patterning, and molecular recognition. Many SAM systems have been investigated, but alkanethiols adsorbed on gold are the most successful combination. This pairing offers a variety of advantages, including the ability to tune precisely the interfacial properties of a surface through the well-established organic synthetic methodologies that have been developed for preparing custom omega-terminated alkanethiols. Alkanethiolate monolayers are moderately stable at room temperature; however, these films degrade over time and readily desorb upon moderate heating. This shortcoming limits the use of SAMs in applications involving elevated temperatures or harsh environments. Accordingly, new adsorbates with multiple bonding moieties have been created to enhance the stability and versatility of SAMs. In this Account, we examine a variety of multidentate adsorbate structures that have been used to generate SAMs on planar substrates and on nanoparticles. Each of these chelating adsorbates (bidentates and tridentates) has been designed to generate well-defined organic monolayer films with multiple attachment points to the underlying substrate. This bonding arrangement allows the formation of SAMs with enhanced stability through the entropy-driven chelate effect. The research examined here demonstrates that multidentate adsorbates provide robust films: they enable the use of SAMs under conditions that are incompatible with SAMs derived from normal alkanethiols. Another advantage offered by multidentate adsorbates is the capacity for new paradigms in thin-film composition. In particular, appropriately designed chelating adsorbates can be engineered to have two or more chemically distinct terminal groups that are covalently linked to the same underlying headgroup, without adding steric bulk that might prove detrimental to the resultant assembly. This strategy allows the generation of homogeneously mixed multicomponent surfaces, overcoming the problem of phase separation or islanding that is pervasive when two or more chemically distinct adsorbates are used to form mixed SAMs. Such homogeneously mixed films offer the opportunity to fine-tune the interfacial properties of a substrate and to create unique heterogeneous interfaces that are well defined by the chemical composition of the tailgroups exposed at the surface. The insight derived from these studies opens the door to new uses for SAMs, both in surface engineering applications (such as corrosion resistance and soft lithographic patterning) and in the stabilization and manipulation of nanopartides.