Studies on the effect of electrode pretreatment on the coverage of self-assembled monolayers of dodecanethiol on gold by electrochemical reductive desorption determination.

This paper examines the effect of five major pretreatments on the surface coverage Γ(m) of dodecanethiol self-assembled monolayer on polycrystalline gold electrode (C(12)SH-SAMs-Au). It is based on the electrochemical reductive desorption in the alkaline solution by cyclic voltammetry (CV). The five different pretreatment methods include: aqua regia pretreatment, reductive annealed pretreatment, UV/O(3) pretreatment, piranha reagents pretreatment and simple polishing pretreatment, and then all above pretreatments following the same procedure of electrochemistry cleaning.