Soft Landing of Complex Molecules on Surfaces

Abstract

Soft and reactive landing of mass-selected ions onto surfaces has become a topic of substantial interest due to its promising potential for the highly controlled preparation of materials. For example, there are possible applications in the production of peptide and protein microarrays for use in high-throughput screening, protein separation and conformational enrichment of peptides, redox protein characterization, thin-film production, and the preparation of catalysts through deposition of clusters and organometallic complexes. Soft landing overcomes many of the limitations associated with conventional thin-film production techniques and offers unprecedented selectivity and specificity of preparation of deposited species. This review discusses the fundamental aspects of soft and reactive landing of mass-selected ions on surfaces that pertain to applications of these techniques in biomaterials, molecular electronics, catalysis, and interfacial chemistry.

New mass spectrometry techniques for studying physical chemistry of atmospheric heterogeneous processes

“…Combined with depth profiling capabilities, this technique may be used in the future for 3D chemical imaging of individual particles on substrates. Although images of individual particles deposited on the substrates may be affected by transformations of particle morphologies upon sample collection, these effects can be minimised by gentle deposition of charged particles using ion soft landing [214][215][216] that can be further developed for particle deposition. Alternatively, the advent of novel coherent light source facilities based on X-ray free electron laser technology has opened up an additional unique opportunity for on-the-fly imaging and mass spectrometric characterisation of individual particles [217].…”

Probing Molecular Solids with Low-Energy Ions

“…Miller et al (82) exploited this property to develop nonreactive patterning based on ion soft landing. Developments in this area have been described in detail elsewhere (81,90).…”

“…They can also be followed with other well-known detection techniques. Several reviews on this topic are available (48,74,81,86,(107)(108)(109). Below, we describe some of these studies to illustrate recent developments.…”

Unraveling the Factors That Control Soft Landing of Small Silyl Ions on Fluorinated Self-Assembled Monolayers

“…13 The advantage of SL over other methods of preparation of materials resides in the high selectivity of the projectile ion (chemical, isotopic, structural) together with some control over the collision process through the selection of the projectile translational energy. 1,[14][15] The kind of projectile ions that have been used in SL studies include small and medium size polyatomic ions, [12][13][16][17][18][19][20][21] atomic and organometalic clusters, [22][23][24] peptides, 4 self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of alkanethiolates on gold 38 have been the most widely used for several reasons. 1 They can be prepared with low levels of surface contamination, they are stable in ultrahigh vacuum conditions, and have a well-characterized and highly ordered structure, therefore making them excellent candidates for fundamental studies.…”