Metal-insulator Transition (MIT) Materials for Biomedical Applications

Transitional metal oxides get considerable interest in electronics and other engineering applications over few decades. These materials show several orders of magnitude metal-insulator transition (MIT) triggered by external stimuli. Bio-sensing using Vanadium dioxide (VO2), a MIT material is largely unexplored. In this short article, we investigate the VO2 based thermal sensor performance for measuring the biomolecule concentration. Active sensing layer is chromium and niobium co-doped VO2 as it shows 11.9%/°C temperature coefficient of resistance (TCR) with practically no thermal hysteresis. Our study demonstrated that VO2 based microsensors can be used to measure the biomolecule concentrations, which produce temperature changes in the mK range. For 1mK change in temperature, the maximum detection voltage is near 0.4V