Surfactant adsorption onto colloidal particles is of eminent importance to technological processes in which colloidal stability or detergency plays a role [1][2][3][4][5]. Surfactant adsorption onto hydrophilic surfaces can be regarded as a surface aggregation process, reminiscent of micelle formation in solution [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. When the anchoring of the surfactant heads to the surface is weak, as in the case of nonionic surfactants at oxide surfaces, the morphology of surface aggregates may depend both on the anchoring strength [15,16] and on the curvature of the adsorbing surface [17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. For instance, for the surfactant penta (ethyleneglycol) monododecylether (C 12 E 5 ) it was recently found that discrete surface micelles are formed on silica nanoparticles [19,21], although flat bilayers aggregates are preferred at planar silica surfaces [11,12]. At even weaker anchoring energies, surface micelles may be disfavored against micelles in solution, implying that little or no adsorption occurs, as in the case of dodecyl maltoside (β-C 12 G 2 ) at silica nanoparticles [19].Here, we study the influence of particle size and surface modification on the adsorption of the surfactant C 12 E 5 at silica nanoparticles. The particles were synthesized by a modified Stöber method [24] yielding particles of narrow size distribution down to the 10 to 50 nm size range which was of interest in this study. In this method, the basic amino acid lysine is used instead of ammonia as the catalyst for the hydrolysis of the silica precursor. For the resulting Lys-Sil particles [24] it was found that the adsorption isotherm of C 12 E 5 exhibits a pronounced dependence on particle size. To assess the influence of lysine on the surface energy and the adsorption of the surfactant at the silica particles we also investigated the adsorption of lysine on pure siliceous silica nanoparticles (Ludox-TMA) and