Student-Faculty Collaborative Research Grant Report

I received funding to hire one and a half students, Geoffrey Rath (full-time) and Agatha Ulibarri (only one month), to study the electrical sensitivity of graphene field effect transistors (GFETs) in a liquid environment. Graphene is a material that responds to nearby electrical voltages. When voltages change near the graphene, the resistance of graphene will change in response, providing a method to detect these voltages separate from everything else in the liquid. We studied two important properties of graphene. First, graphene has been studied as a potential use within so-called supercapacitors. However, measurements of the medium within which the graphene resides have not been studied. We worked to determine the dielectric constant for the most common materials. Second, we continued a project to use graphene transistors to detect oxygen dissolved within liquid