Order and Melting in Self-Assembled Alkanol Monolayers on Amorphous SiO₂

Molecular self-assembly is a key to wide-ranging nano- and microscale applications in numerous fields. Understanding its underlying molecular level science is therefore of prime importance. This study resolves the Å-scale structure of the earliest and simplest self-assembled monolayer (SAM), octadecanol on amorphous-SiO2-terminated Si(001) substrate, and determines the structure’s temperature evolution. At low temperatures lateral hexagonal...