We used a beam of noble gas atoms in a metastable excited state to expose a thin (1.5 nm) self-assembled monolayer resist applied over a gold-coated silicon wafer. We determined exposure damage as a function of dose of metastable atoms by processing the samples in a wet-chemical etch to remove the gold from unprotected regions and then measuring the reflectivity with a laser and observing the microstructure with an atomic force microscope. We found that the minimum dose required to damage the resist substantially was 1.7(3)x10(15) atoms/cm(2) for metastable helium, and 25(7)X10(15) atoms/cm(2) for metastable argon.