SensNews Sept 2020

Sensor100 September 2020 24 Single-atom-thin platinum makes a great chemical sensor Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, together with colleagues from other universities, have discovered the possibility to prepare one-atom thin platinum for use as a chem- ical sensor.The results were recently published in the scientific journal Advanced Material Interfaces. "In a nutshell, we managed to make a metal layer just one-atom thick—sort of a new material. We found that this atomically-thin met- al is super sensitive to its chemical environment. Its electrical resistance changes significantly when it inter- acts with gases," explains Kyung Ho Kim, postdoc at the Quantum Device Physics Laboratory at the Department of Microtechnology and Nanoscience at Chalmers, and lead author of the article. The researchers used the sensitive chemical-to-electrical transduction capability of atomically thin platinum to detect toxic gasses at the parts-per-billion level.They demonstrated this with detection of benzene, a compound that is carcinogenic even at very small concentrations, and for which no low-cost detection apparatus exists . Reported by Phys.Org News 14 September A schematic of platinum atoms deposited on the surface of the carbon "buffer-layer," which is a graphene-like 2-D insulating material grown epitaxially on silicon carbide, that enables two-dimensional growth of platinum.