Suspended Carbon Nanowire-Based Structures for Sensor Platforms

Abstract

In this report, fabrication of monolithic suspended carbon nanowire-based structures including single nanowire and nanomeshes, and their applications as electrochemical/gas/bio-sensors are introduced. The suspended carbon structures are fabricated using the carbon-MEMS process consisting of conventional UV-lithography and pyrolysis which accompanies significant volume shrinkage resulting in the formation of complex suspended carbon nanostructures. The suspended carbon nanowires shows good robustness enough to be processed with photolithography and deposition; this enables patterning of functional materials in sub-micromenter scale without any nanofabrication technologies. The single suspended carbon nanowires of 200 nm diameter can be selectively coated with a thin palladium or ZnO nanowires which showed good gas sensing capability down to 20 ppm hydrogen gas and 50 ppm CO, NOx, H2 gases respectively. Combined with a substrate-bound carbon band electrode, the suspended carbon mesh showed high efficiency of redox cycling enabling highly sensitive sensing of dopamine and glucose.