Electrical Resistivity Of Graphene Research Articles

Graphene-Based Sensor for Detection of Bacterial Pathogens.

Microbial colonization to biomedical surfaces and biofilm formation is one of the key challenges in the medical field. Recalcitrant biofilms on such surfaces cause serious infections which are difficult to treat using antimicrobial agents, due to their complex structure. Early detection of microbial colonization and monitoring of biofilm growth could turn the tide by providing timely guidance for treatment or replacement of biomedical devices. Hence, there is a need for sensors, which could generate rapid signals upon bacterial colonization. In this study, we developed a simple prototype sensor based on pristine, non-functionalized graphene. The detection principle is a change in electrical resistance of graphene upon exposure to bacterial cells. Without functionalization with specific receptors, such sensors cannot be expected to be selective to certain bacteria. However, we demonstrated that two different bacterial species can be detected and differentiated by our sensor due to their different growth dynamics, adherence pattern, density of adhered bacteria and microcolonies formation. These distinct behaviors of tested bacteria depicted distinguishable pattern of resistance change, resistance versus gate voltage plot and hysteresis effect. This sensor is simple to fabricate, can easily be miniaturized, and can be effective in cases when precise identification of species is not needed.

Graphene-based materials for antenna applications

Internet of Things (IoT) has become one of the trending technologies in recent years. With the wide applications and rapid development of wireless communication and IoT, there are growing number of requirements on novel device design, such as flexible antennas and tunable antennas. The demand of transparent and flexible wireless communicational devices is ever-increasing for a wide range of scenarios, such as noninvasive healthcare, real-time wearable electronics, etc. Besides, a highly integrated antenna with tunable bandwidth and low energy consumption is in pressing demands in order to reduce the number of antennas and achieve better signal strength and higher speed signal transmission. Graphene materials have drawn much attention due to its extraordinary optical properties, high electrical and thermal conductivity, and excellent mechanical properties. All of these properties underline that graphene can be considered as a highly competitive material for wearable communication devices. Moreover, the electrical resistance of graphene and graphene oxide could be simply changed by external electric fields, applied strain and environment, which alters the electrical characteristics of the graphene-based microwave devices. Accordingly, graphene materials have a great potential in various reconfigurable or tunable devices. Our group fabricated the first graphene-based flexible and transparent wireless antenna with 2D large single-crystalline graphene and 1D AgNW hybrid material based on the features of graphene, such as high carrier mobility, transparency and flexibility, etc. The antenna exhibited a 75% light transmittance and an ultrawide bandwidth ranging from 5.6 to 12.8 GHz, combining with outstanding durability and stability with an almost negligible variation of reflection coefficients over 1000 bending cycles. Further research confirmed that the existence of graphene harmonized the compatibility between antenna and integrated chips, hence improved the total performance of the radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. Graphene/AgNW-based RFID tag was fabricated with an operating UHF band of 850–960 MHz and a reading distance of 130 cm, showing a great commercial potential. The excellent performance and unique properties of graphene/AgNW-based antenna and RFID tag came from the synergistic effect between 1D and 2D nanomaterials, providing a new vision for the design of next generation wireless electronics. Meanwhile, a slot antenna with tunable bandwidth was proposed. The antenna consisted of a planar slot antenna with graphene ink printed at the gap between the ground and a small patch. The graphene ink was made from the mixture of graphene powder and graphene oxide aqueous dispersion. Graphene oxide sheets functioned as effective surfactants rendering assistance to form uniform printable inks, displayed alterable electrical resistance by optimization of mixing proportions between graphene and graphene oxide. Dried graphene inks displayed tunable electrical resistance under applied DC voltages. The variation in the resistance of graphene ink affected radiation of the slot antenna, resulting in a shift of operating bandwidth. The proposed antenna achieved a shifting bandwidth of 0.54 from 6 to 5.46 GHz after applying DC voltage less than 15 V. Such cost-effective, easily acquired, and printable graphene inks integrated the dual advantages of graphene and graphene oxide. It could be further applied in many other fields of printable electronic devices.

Electrical resistance of graphene reinforced cement paste

Electrical resistance of graphene reinforced cement paste

Impact of encapsulation method on the adsorbate induced electrical instability of monolayer graphene

Monolayer graphene transferred onto a set of silicon carbide (SiC) substrates was encapsulated with a thin SiO2 film in order to prevent its interaction with atmospheric adsorbates. The encapsulation of graphene samples was realized by using two different thin film growth methods such as thermal evaporation (TE) and state-of-the-art pulsed electron deposition (PED). The encapsulation efficiency of these two techniques on the structural and electrical characteristics of graphene was compared with each other. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analysis showed that unlike the SiO2 thin film grown with PED, structural defects like cracks were readily formed on TE grown films due to the lack of surface wettability. The electronic transport measurements revealed that the electrical resistivity of graphene has been increased by two orders of magnitude, and the carrier mobility has been subsequently decreased upon the encapsulation process with the PED method. However, in-vacuum transient photocurrent spectroscopy (TPS) measurements conducted for short periods and a few cycles showed that the graphene layer encapsulated with the PED grown SiO2 film is electrically far more stable than the one encapsulated with TE grown SiO2 film. The results of TPS measurements were related to the SEM images to unravel the mechanism behind the improved electrical stability of graphene samples encapsulated with the PED grown SiO2 film.

CVD Graphene Transfer from Copper Substrate to Polymer

This work compares the methods of CVD-graphene transfer by hot pressing on a PET/EVA polymer and spin coating with dissolved PMMA polymer. Two variants of copper removal are considered: mechanical cleavage and chemical etching. The effect of these methods on transmittance and electrical resistance of graphene is investigated. It is shown that copper mechanical cleavage results in an increase in electrical resistance of graphene, which is associated with formation of additional defects in graphene. When PET/EVA polymer hot pressing is used, graphene is deformed due to the difference in thermal expansion coefficients. This also results in an increase in resistance of graphene.

Facile fabrication of properties-controllable graphene sheet.

Graphene has been received a considerable amount of attention as a transparent conducting electrode (TCE) which may be able to replace indium tin oxide (ITO) to overcome the significant weakness of the poor flexibility of ITO. Given that graphene is the thinnest 2-dimensional (2D) material known, it shows extremely high flexibility, and its lateral periodic honeycomb structure of sp2-bonded carbon atoms enables ~2.3% of incident light absorption per layer. However, there is a trade-off between the electrical resistance and the optical transmittance, and the fixed absorption rate in graphene limits is use when fabricating devices. Therefore, a more efficient method which continuously controls the optical and electrical properties of graphene is needed. Here, we introduce a method which controls the optical transmittance and the electrical resistance of graphene through various thicknesses of the top Cu layers with a Cu/Ni metal catalyst structure used to fabricate a planar mesh pattern of single and multi-layer graphene. We exhibit a continuous transmittance change from 85% (MLG) to 97.6% (SLG) at an incident light wavelength of 550 nm on graphene samples simultaneously grown in a CVD quartz tube. We also investigate the relationships between the sheet resistances.

Phonon-limited carrier mobility and resistivity from carbon nanotubes to graphene

Under which conditions do the electrical transport properties of one-dimensional (1D) carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and 2D graphene become equivalent? We have performed atomistic calculations of the phonon-limited electrical mobility in graphene and in a wide range of CNTs of different types to address this issue. The theoretical study is based on a tight-binding method and a force-constant model from which all possible electron-phonon couplings are computed. The electrical resistivity of graphene is found in very good agreement with experiments performed at high carrier density. A common methodology is applied to study the transition from one to two dimensions by considering CNTs with diameter up to 16 nm. It is found that the mobility in CNTs of increasing diameter converges to the same value, i.e., the mobility in graphene. This convergence is much faster at high temperature and high carrier density. For small-diameter CNTs, the mobility depends strongly on chirality, diameter, and the existence of a band gap.

Electrical transport in graphene with different interface conditions

The effect of the interface on the electrical resistance of graphene chemically deposited from the gas phase (CVD graphene) has been studied in the range from room temperature to the nitrogen boiling temperature. The resistance of a single-layer CVD graphene in the cases of its contacting with Si/SiO2 and GaAs substrates demonstrates a nearly linear metallic temperature dependence with almost the same slope of the normalized curves. This slope corresponds to an increase in the graphene resistance by ~8% when graphene is heated from the boiling nitrogen temperature to room temperature. The four-layer graphene demonstrates a semiconducting temperature dependence in the same temperature range. It has been found that the sputtering of an organic insulator (parylene) on the four-layer graphene increases the slope of this dependence by ~5% and, at room temperature, increases the graphene resistance by ~20%.

Physics-Based Solution for Electrical Resistance of Graphene Under Self-Heating Effect

In this brief, we present a physics-based solution for the temperature-dependent electrical resistance of a suspended metallic single-layer graphene (SLG) sheet under Joule self-heating. The effect of in-plane and flexural phonons on the electron scattering rates for a doped SLG layer has been considered, which particularly demonstrates the variation of the electrical resistance with increasing temperature at different current levels using the solution of the self-heating equation. The present solution agrees well with the available experimental data done with back-gate electrostatic method over a wide range of temperatures.

Electrical Conductivity of Graphene Composites with In and In-Ga Alloy

Samples of composites of graphene with indium or indium-gallium alloy as the matrix were prepared by a process of spreading exfoliated graphene oxide on the foils, repeatedly folding and rolling. The foils were intermittently annealed and the process repeated by addition of more graphene oxide. Indium flux was used to remove any indium or gallium oxide. The samples were characterized by x-ray diffraction, and optical and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Electrical resistivity and temperature coefficient of resistance (TCR) were measured using a four-probe method in the temperature range of 260 K to 340 K, and the results were used to determine the volume fraction of graphene from effective mean-field analysis. The volume fraction of graphene remained between 0.11 and 0.14 in samples of In with graphene and between 0.12 and 0.13 in samples of In-Ga with graphene. The results indicate that the electrical resistivity and the TCR of the composite were reduced by the addition of graphene. The resistivity of graphene remained between 1.19 × 10−6 ohm cm and 1.87 × 10−6 ohm cm in all samples and was thus almost independent of the matrix composition. The electrical resistivity of graphene was found to be an order of magnitude smaller than that of indium or the indium-gallium alloy.