Titration of free hydroxyl and strained siloxane sites on silicon dioxide with fluorescent probes

A technique enabling the detection and quantification of low density sites on planar SiO2 surfaces is demonstrated. Fluorescent probes are used to titrate free hydroxyl and strained siloxane sites on the surface of amorphous SiO2 substrates in vacuum. The titration of free hydroxyl sites was performed to validate the method and to provide a reference for the measurement of the strained siloxane site density. Perylene derivatives with different functional groups are chemisorbed onto the surface sites, enabling in situ photoluminescence (PL) measurements of the bound fluorophores. An amine functional group is used to selectively titrate strained siloxane sites, while an alcohol group is used for the titration of free hydroxyl sites. Emission intensity was found to be nonlinear with coverage for bound fluorophore densities greater than 0.1 nm(-2), necessitating the removal of molecules from the surface into a solution to obtain accurate density measurements. For lower densities, the coverage of bound fluorophores can be estimated directly from in situ PL measurements. The measured areal densities of bound fluorophores after titrating free hydroxyl sites are in good agreement with literature values for the densities of such sites on high surface area silica. PL measurements of SiO2 surfaces titrated with an amine derivative of perylene indicate that strained siloxane sites exist for vacuum pretreatment temperatures of 300 °C and increase with increasing pretreatment temperature. Densities of strained siloxane sites on the silica surface are estimated at 0.004-0.02 nm(-2) for pretreatment temperatures of 300-700 °C, demonstrating the sensitivity of this technique.