title: Chemical detection with a single-walled carbon nanotube capacitor.
abstract: We show that the capacitance of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) is highly sensitive to a broad class of chemical vapors and that this transduction mechanism can form the basis for a fast, low-power sorption-based chemical sensor. In the presence of a dilute chemical vapor, molecular adsorbates are polarized by the fringing electric fields radiating from the surface of a SWNT electrode, which causes an increase in its capacitance. We use this effect to construct a high-performance chemical sensor by thinly coating the SWNTs with chemoselective materials that provide a large, class-specific gain to the capacitance response. Such SWNT chemicapacitors are fast, highly sensitive, and completely reversible.
authors.affiliation: Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC 20375, USA. snow@bloch.nrl.navy.mil
authors.forename: E S
authors.initials: ES
authors.lastname: Snow
authors.forename: F K
authors.initials: FK
authors.lastname: Perkins
authors.forename: E J
authors.initials: EJ
authors.lastname: Houser
authors.forename: S C
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Badescu
authors.forename: T L
authors.initials: TL
authors.lastname: Reinecke