Contact Secondary Nucleation and Self Assembled Monolayers

Understanding and controlling nucleation is a long-standing issue in the field of crystallization and solid state chemistry. In this work we use gold-thiol self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) as hetero-surfaces and induce nucleation by contact force to understand the mechanism of contact-induced heterogeneous nucleation, on different SAMs. A set of contact force nucleation experiments in aqueous glycine solution with SAMs of different functional groups has been performed and compared to a control. Results demonstrate significant reduction in nucleation induction time as well as formation of the beta polymorph of glycine a low supersaturations.