CTAB adsorbed to various substrates

Have been going over Surface-Induced Phase Behavior of Alkyltrimethylammonium Bromide Sufactants Adsorbed to Mica, Silica, and Graphite(Surface-Induced Phase Behavior; Liu,J.F.; Ducker, W.A., J. Phys. Chem., 1999, 103, 8558-8567) for the last few days before finals and had to reread some of it following finals to catch back up.  I found it very interesting and helpful in coming up with methods for preparing samples and interpreting AFM images.  As someone still fairly new to adsorption research I especially found the section on variation of chemical potential by changing one or several different parameters including temperature, concentration, concentration of a salt which acting as a co- or counter-ion, the substrate and the length of the alkyl chain.
              I feel that the best surfactant to begin the trials with would be CnTAB due to the amount of literature on its use as well as the ease of changing the length of a surfactant molecule without changing the head group by switching between n-lengths.  The article makes use of a temperature controlling apparatus on their AFM which may be of some use to us as well but if we are not able to use something to keep the temperature constant while taking images of the AFM we may be able to see the changes in morphology and phase behavior as the temperature changes with time in the process of taking the image.
         I have been reading literature to do with many substrates but have been making more notes on the methods of preparation of silica and silicon substrates because of the substrate we will be using first will be silicon which has been milled using reactive ion etching.  We will then place the samples in an oven to promote the formation of an oxide layer to the surface of the sample. An interesting test that was used was the "steam test" for silica substrates, which seems fairly simple and checks for the uniformity of the hydrophilic character of the substrate.  The test is to run steam over the sample and check for a thin layer of water over the whole sample.  If it is a patchy layer of water then the hydrophilic nature is not uniform and must be addressed before using the sample.