Self-assembly and wetting properties of gold nanorod-CTAB molecules on HOPG

Imtiaz Ahmad; Floor Derkink; Tim Boulogne; Pantelis Bampoulis; Harold J W Zandvliet; Hidayat Ullah Khan; Rahim Jan; E Stefan Kooij

doi:10.3762/bjnano.10.69

Self-assembly and wetting properties of gold nanorod-CTAB molecules on HOPG

Beilstein J Nanotechnol. 2019 Mar 13:10:696-705. doi: 10.3762/bjnano.10.69. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Imtiaz Ahmad^{1

2}, Floor Derkink¹, Tim Boulogne¹, Pantelis Bampoulis¹, Harold J W Zandvliet¹, Hidayat Ullah Khan², Rahim Jan³, E Stefan Kooij¹

Affiliations

¹ Physics of Interfaces and Nanomaterials, MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology, University of Twente, P. O. Box 217, 7500AE Enschede, The Netherlands.
² Department of Physics, University of Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa 25120, Pakistan.
³ School of Chemical and Materials Engineering, National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad 44000, Pakistan.

Abstract

The formation of self-assembled superstructures of cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) after drying on a nonwetting highly ordered pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) surface have been investigated using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM). Although SEM did not reveal coverage of CTAB layers, AFM showed not only CTAB assembly, but also the dynamics of the process on the surface. The self-assembled layers of CTAB molecules on the HOPG terraces prior to nanorod deposition were shown to change the wettability of the surface, and as a result, gold nanorod deposition takes place on nonwetting HOPG terraces.

Keywords: CTAB; gold nanorods; micelles; self-assembly; wettability.