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CARBON NANOTUBE MECHANICAL MASS SENSOR WITH SUB-YOCTOGRAM AT ROOM TEMPERATURE 
Auteur(s): Basset C., Tran H.-N., Marcati A. Alves Gustavo, Desgarceaux R., Lecarlate-Fernandez Benjamin, Roblin C., Alibert E., Jelinek R., Barbat J., Tahir S., Lhermerout R., Henn F., Noury A.
(Affiches/Poster)
C'NANO 2025: THE NANOSCIENCE MEETING (Paris, FR), 2025-03-18
Ref HAL: hal-05374877_v1
Exporter : BibTex | endNote
Résumé: Carbon nanotube are exceptional mechanical resonators. Indeed, they are extremely light, with masses in the range of ~ag (1 ag = 10-18g). In addition, as bottom-up materials, they do not suffer from surface defect as their top-down counterparts (MEMS etched from silicon or nitride substrates). From these 2 features stems their exquisite mass sensitivity as demonstrated by Chaste et al[1] with a sensitivity of 1.4 yg in a cryogenic environment. Yet, this sensitivity was reported to be much worse at room temperature, about 25 zg[2]. This has hindered the use of CNTs as sensors in real-life applications. In this work, we propose a unique set-up to track in real time the vibrations of a individual single-walled CNT (SWCNTs) at room temperature. It allows us to demonstrate a record mass sensitivity of 0.2 yg +/- 0.17 yg (1 yg = 10-24 g, the mass of a single proton).We carefully investigated the noise mechanisms that could be limiting the sensitivity: set-up noise, interaction with the gas phase and Brownian motion to name only the most important ones. We found that our device operates closely to the Brownian noise limit and is not limited by external sources of noise. Surprisingly, increasing the pressure up to 35 mbar (after which we could not detect the motion due to viscous damping) does not seem to degrade the sensitivity, which might be preserved up to ambient pressure. Finally, yet importantly, the exquisite sensitivity observed here is similar for several devices, making it a reliable and reproducible feature. This opens up the possibility to perform single-molecule sensing, in various contexts such as biological applications, mass spectrometry or surface science[1,3].[1] J. Chaste, A. Eichler, J. Moser, G. Ceballos, R. Rurali, A. Bachtold (2012). A nanomechanical mass sensor with yoctogram resolution, Nat. Nano, 7, 5, 301-304.[2] B. Lassagne, D. Garcia-Sanchez, A. Aguasca, A. Bachtold (2008). Ultrasensitive mass sensing with a nanotube electromechanical resonator, Nano. Let., 8, 11, 3735 – 3738.[3] P. Robin, L. Bocquet (2023). Nanofluidics at the crossroads, Soft Cond. Matt., preprint.
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