LiquidsasMediumtoEnhancetheElectrochemicalStabilit.docVIP

# Supplementary Material (ESI) for Chemical Communications # This journal is ? The Royal Society of Chemistry 2005 PAGE 2 S-PAGE 8 Room-temperature Ionic Liquids as Medium to Enhance the Electrochemical Stability of Self-assembled Monolayers of Alkanethiol on Gold Electrode Jinghong Li*, Yanfei Shen, Yuanjian Zhang and Yang Liu ESI Experimental details Reagents 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium hexafluorophosphate (BMIMPF6) (97%) was purchased from Acros. It was washed with double distilled water to remove the residual halogen in it, then the water was decanted, and BMIMPF6 was heated at 80 oC for 12 h under vacuum and then kept under vacuum desiccators to protect it from moisture [1]. Octadencanethiol (C18SH), dodencanethiol (C12SH) and octanethiol (C8SH) were purchased from Acros and used as received. Other reagents were of analytical grade and used as received. All the water used in experiments was the double distilled water obtained from a Millipore-Q system (18.2 M?). Preparation of self-assembled monolayers of C18SH on the gold electrode A gold electrode was mechanically polished with 1, 0.3 and 0.05 ?m ?-Al2O3 and washed ultrasonically with double distilled water, subsequently electrochemically cleaned in 1 M H2SO4 by potential scanning between – 0.2 and 1.55 V until a reproducible cyclic voltammogram was obtained. The monolayers were formed by placing the clean bare gold electrode in a freshly made 1 mM C18SH solution in ethanol for 48 h at room temperature. After chemsorption, the gold electrode modified with C18SH was rinsed with dry ethanol and double distilled water, subsequently blown dry with high-purity nitrogen before further characterization. Electrochemical measurement Electrochemical measurements were carried out in a conventional three-electrode electrochemical cell. The cell was sealed to minimize the influence of O2 and H2O during experiments. The working electrode was a bare gold electrode (0.00785 cm2) or a SAMs modified gold elect