Assembly of highly ordered nanoparticle monolayers at a water/hexane interface.

This paper reports a methodology for preparing ordering hydrophilic metal nanoparticles into close-packed 2-dimensional arrays at a hexane-water interface with alkanethiol in the hexane layer. The destabilization of metal nanoparticles by the addition of alcohol caused the nanoparticles to adsorb to an interface where the surface of entrapped Au nanoparticle was in situ coated with the long-chain alkanethiols present in a hexane layer. The adsorption of alkanethiol to the nanoparticle surface caused the conversion of the electrostatic repulsive force to a van der Waals interaction, which is a key feature in forming highly ordered close-packed nanoparticle arrays.