Resolving the chemical nature of nanodesigned silica surface obtained via a bottom-up approach

The covalent grafting on silica surfaces of a functional dendritic organosilane coupling agent inserted, in a long alkyl chain monolayer, is described. In this paper, we show that depending on experimental parameters, particularly the solvent, it is possible to obtain a nanodesigned surface via a bottom-up approach. Thus, we succeed in the formation of both homogeneous dense monolayer and a heterogeneous dense monolayer, the latter being characterized by a nanosized volcano-type pattern (4-6 nm of height, 100 nm of width, and around 3 volcanos/μm(2)) randomly distributed over the surface. The dendritic attribute of the grafted silylated coupling agent affords enough anchoring sites to immobilize covalently functional gold nanoparticles (GNPs), coated with amino PEG polymer to resolve the chemical nature of the surfaces and especially the volcano type nanopattern structures of the heterogeneous monolayer. Thus, the versatile surface chemistry developed herein is particularly challenging as the nanodesign is straightforward achieved in a bottom-up approach without any specific lithography device.