Chemical sensing with switchable transport channels in graphene grain boundaries

Poya Yasaei, Bijandra Kumar, Reza Hantehzadeh, Morteza Kayyalha, Artem Baskin, Nikita Repnin, Canhui Wang, Robert F. Klie, Yong P. Chen, Petr Král and Amin Salehi-Khojin ()
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Poya Yasaei: University of Illinois at Chicago
Bijandra Kumar: University of Illinois at Chicago
Reza Hantehzadeh: University of Illinois at Chicago
Morteza Kayyalha: Birck Nanotechnology Center and School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University
Artem Baskin: University of Illinois at Chicago
Nikita Repnin: University of Illinois at Chicago
Canhui Wang: University of Illinois at Chicago
Robert F. Klie: University of Illinois at Chicago
Yong P. Chen: Birck Nanotechnology Center and School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University
Petr Král: University of Illinois at Chicago
Amin Salehi-Khojin: University of Illinois at Chicago

Nature Communications, 2014, vol. 5, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Grain boundaries can markedly affect the electronic, thermal, mechanical and optical properties of a polycrystalline graphene. While in many applications the presence of grain boundaries in graphene is undesired, here we show that they have an ideal structure for the detection of chemical analytes. We observe that an isolated graphene grain boundary has ~300 times higher sensitivity to the adsorbed gas molecules than a single-crystalline graphene grain. Our electronic structure and transport modelling reveal that the ultra-sensitivity in grain boundaries is caused by a synergetic combination of gas molecules accumulation at the grain boundary, together with the existence of a sharp onset energy in the transmission spectrum of its conduction channels. The discovered sensing platform opens up new pathways for the design of nanometre-scale highly sensitive chemical detectors.

Date: 2014
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DOI: 10.1038/ncomms5911

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