Gold Film Surface Preparation for Self-Assembled Monolayer Studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Evaporated gold films are frequently used as substrates for the study of biomolecular adsorbates, nanoparticle systems, amd partial and full monolayer films. These studies often benefit from a predeposition cleaning of the surface that removes adventitiously adsorbed material from laboratory contaminants. Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) is used in this study to explore the microscopic consequences of two pretreatment protocols used in literature reports of self-assembled monolayers, based on sulfochromic and piranha acid solutions. These measurements show that treatment of the Au/mica surface with piranha acid can lead to extensive and uncontrolled etching of the surface and severe disruption of the surface topography; extended exposure causes the precipitation of crystallites on the surface that are highly mobile during STM imaging processes. Exposure of Au/mica surfaces to sulfochromic acid leads to the formation of permanent etch pits of the surface that are exclusively one Au layer deep; extended exposure leads to progressive etching and oxidation of the surface, ultimately leading to the formation of 0.33-0.36 nm high islands on the otherwise flat Au/mica surface. The piranha acid solutions are significantly more likely to cause the Au film to delaminate from the mica support than are the sulfochromic acid solutions. These results show that sulfochromic surface preparation is a direct and reliable method for the elimination of organic residues from Au(111)-textured surfaces, while causing a minimum of structural and chemical surface damage.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".