Surface Modification of Diamond and Cubic Boron Nitride Films for Sensing Applications

Description

Diamond has shown attractive potentials in applications as electrochemical electrodes, and chemical and biological sensors after surface modification. Compared with diamond, cBN is expected to be superior to diamond in some aspects due to its higher band-gap, and both p- and n-type conductivity. Moreover, the B and N terminations of the cBN surface in the sp3>configuration are able provide more possibility for the surface modification. For example, modification can be selectively made on either B termination or N termination, making cBN a very attractive material for a variety of chem- or bio-sensing applications.In this project we propose to covalently functionalize the diamond and cBN surfaces with specially designed receptors for selective recognition of environmentally or biologically important species,, such as heavy metal cations, Hg2+, Pb2+, cd2+, bioactive anions, heparin, glucose, chiral amino acids, ATP, dopamine, creatinine, proteins, DNA, etc. Such functionalized cBN and diamond are capable of detecting analytes in complex mixtures. For example, it can effectively resist the nonspecific adsorption of proteins in protein mixtures. In addition, the selectivity, sensitivity, response time, and durability of cBN-/diamond- based chemical or biological sensors will be evaluated by means of comprehensive methods.