Abstract

A manual ellipsometer using light of wavelength 546 nm was used to study the adsorption of α- and β-quinolines onto the mercury-0.5 M NaOH solution as a function of electrode potential and of concentration. There is a close parallelism between the amount adsorbed and the change of the optical parameter Δ. The broad features can be interpreted in terms of two orientations of α-quinoline and three orientations of β-quinoline at the interface. Further analysis of the optical results suggests that the adsorbed layer is anisotropic although it is just possible that an absorbing layer could also account for the observed behaviour.