A study of temperature effect on vertically aligned carbon nanofibers for bio/chemical sensors development

Abstract

One of the major limitations in the development of ultrasensitive electrochemical biosensors based on one dimensional nanostructure is the difficulty involved with reliably fabricating nanoelectrode arrays (NEAs). In this work, to ensure nanoelectrode behavior and higher sensitivity, Vertically Aligned Carbon Nano Fibers (VACNF) are precisely grown on 100 nm Ni dots with 1µm spacing on each micro pad. However, in order to examine the quality and measure the height and diameter of the VACNFs, a surface detection and measurement tool at the nanoscale level is employed. In this paper, we introduce an approach to measure these nano-scale features through Atomic Force Microscope (AFM). With this method, both the 2D and 3D images of sample surface are generated and the sizes of carbon nanofibers are obtained with statistical analysis. Furthermore, temperature effect on the dimensions of VACNFs is studied.