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496e

Understanding the Reversibility of Carbon Nanotube Gas Sensors

Michael S. Strano, 66-566 Department of Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139 and Chang Young Lee, Chemical Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 104 RAL, MC-712, 600 S. Mathews Ave., Urbana, IL 61801.

Single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNT) has been highlighted as a promising gas sensing element due to its unique properties such as one dimensional electronic structure and high surface to volume ratio. Even though the sensor responses from a number of SWNT gas sensors are at least partially irreversible, little attention has been paid to the nature of the irreversible sensor response. In this work, we demonstrate a shift from an irreversible sensor response to a reversible one via the chemical treatment of a dielectrophoretically formed SWNT network. Both Raman spectroscopy and atomic force microscopy (AFM) show that this shift is related to the nanotube aggregation as well as the percolation behavior. A real-time monitoring of Raman features of metallic and semiconducting SWNT further explains the sensing mechanism.