High performance sensors based on resistance fluctuations of single layer graphene transistors

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that measuring low frequency resistance fluctuations in single-layer graphene transistors creates highly sensitive, specific, and fast chemical vapor sensors, outperforming traditional resistance change detection methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel sensor approach based on resistance fluctuation measurements in graphene transistors, significantly enhancing detection performance over existing methods.

Findings

Sensor sensitivity exceeds traditional methods by over two orders of magnitude.

Resistance fluctuation measurement provides high specificity and fast response.

A model based on number-density fluctuations explains the noise-based detection advantages.

Abstract

One of the most interesting predicted applications of graphene monolayer based devices is as high quality sensors. In this letter we show, through systematic experiments, a chemical vapor sensor based on the measurement of low frequency resistance fluctuations of single layer graphene field-effect-transistor (SLG-FET) devices. The sensor has extremely high sensitivity, very high specificity, high fidelity and fast response times. The performance of the device using this scheme of measurement (which uses resistance fluctuations as the detection parameter) is more than two orders of magnitude better than a detection scheme where changes in the average value of the resistance is monitored. We propose a number-density fluctuation based model to explain the superior characteristics of noise measurement based detection scheme presented in this article.