Graphene hears the ultrasound

The research team led by Gerard Verbiest and Christoph Stampfer at the Physics Department at the RWTH Aachen University, discovered a new possibility for ultrasound detection. The physicists fabricated a graphene resonator on a silicon substrate in a way that the device could be mounted onto an ultrasound transducer. For the first time, this allowed them to measure the responds of a graphene resonator to ultrasound propagating through the substrate. They achieved a resolution of 7 pm/√Hz by making use of the unique properties of graphene. As the resolution solely depends on the electronic properties of the graphene, they show that the detection also works away from any mechanical resonance of the suspended graphene. The new insights could be very useful for numerous sensing applications at the nanoscale. The research results have now been published in the scientific journal “Nano Letters”.

Continue reading “Graphene hears the ultrasound”