Nano-engineering the material structure of preferentially oriented nano-graphitic carbon for making high-performance electrochemical micro-sensors
Edoardo Cuniberto, Abdullah Alharbi, Ting Wu, Zhujun Huang, Kasra Sardashti, Kae-Dyi You, Kim Kisslinger, Takashi Taniguchi, Kenji Watanabe, Roozbeh Kiani & Davood Shahrjerdi
Scientific Reports volume 10, Article number: 9444 (2020) Cite this article
[Abstract]
Direct synthesis of thin-film carbon nanomaterials on oxide-coated silicon substrates provides a viable pathway for building a dense array of miniaturized (micron-scale) electrochemical sensors with high performance. However, material synthesis generally involves many parameters, making material engineering based on trial and error highly inefficient. Here, we report a two-pronged strategy for producing engineered thin-film carbon nanomaterials that have a nano-graphitic structure. First, we introduce a variant of the metal-induced graphitization technique that generates micron-scale islands of nano-graphitic carbon materials directly on oxide-coated silicon substrates. A novel feature of our material synthesis is that, through substrate engineering, the orientation of graphitic planes within the film aligns preferentially with the silicon substrate. This feature allows us to use the Raman spectroscopy for quantifying structural properties of the sensor surface, where the electrochemical processes occur. Second, we find phenomenological models for predicting the amplitudes of the redox current and the sensor capacitance from the material structure, quantified by Raman. Our results indicate that the key to achieving high-performance micro-sensors from nano-graphitic carbon is to increase both the density of point defects and the size of the graphitic crystallites. Our study offers a viable strategy for building planar electrochemical micro-sensors with high-performance.
[Introduction]
Carbon materials are widely used in building electrochemical sensors for detecting biomolecules because of their favorable electrochemical activity, bio-compatibility, rich surface chemistry, and strong resistance to bio-fouling. In biomolecule sensing applications, it is desirable to implement a large-scale sensing system comprising many small (micron-sized) carbon electrodes with high packing density. However, such large-scale systems are challenging to implement. In particular, existing implementations are limited mainly to one or a handful of carbon electrodes1,2,3,4,5.
Significant progress has been made on the development of single-electrode micro-sensors from bulk carbon materials, such as carbon fibers6,7 and nanotube yarns8,9. However, the large cylindrical form of these materials (>5 μm diameter) limits them to the fabrication of single or small-array micro-sensors. Importantly, while past research on this topic has evaluated a wide variety of carbon-based materials for boosting the sensor performance, the search for an optimal carbon material is still ongoing10,11,12,13. It is generally accepted that, in a carbon material, defects and functional groups influence the sensitivity and the charging current of carbon-based electrochemical sensors. However, from a fundamental standpoint, a detailed understanding of the underlying electrochemical mechanisms that control these sensor characteristics, i.e. electron transfer rate and electrode capacitance, is still a subject of research14,15,16,17.
Due to the above-mentioned limitations of bulk carbon materials in producing a dense sensor array, one promising strategy is to form thin-film carbon materials on dielectric substrates using standard microfabrication techniques. This generally involves converting lithographically-defined polymeric islands into pure sp2 hybridized carbon through a high-temperature thermal treatment (a process known as pyrolysis)18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25. Of various substrates, dielectric-coated silicon is an attractive choice because of its low cost, its commercial availability in large dimensions (up to 300?mm diameter), and its compatibility with standard micro-fabrication techniques. The latter feature is particularly useful for making functional sensor carriers from silicon substrates, e.g., by shaping silicon into narrow and flexible shafts for applications in neural interfacing. However, the thermal stability of silicon substrates limits the production temperature of these microfabricated thin-film carbon materials to below 1100?°C. Due to this temperature limit, the resulting material has a fully disordered sp2 structure with slow electron transfer kinetics. Hence, even though this microfabrication process provides a simple method for making thin-film pyrolyzed carbon materials, the resulting sensors have poor sensing characteristics18,26.
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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-66408-9