Fabrication and manipulation of fluorescent carbon nanoparticles for biosensing applications

Carbon Nano-Particles (CNPs) were fabricated by our team which showed green fluorescence under blue excitation, and is promising for future biosensing applications. The possibility of using dielectrophoresis (DEP) manipulation to assemble these CNPs between Au micro-electrodes has been investigated. Preliminary experiments showed that DEP manipulation could accelerate the evaporation of CNPs solution, control the position of resulted structure, and significantly improve the successful rate of the CNPs assembly. In addition, series of experiments have been carried out to determine the optimal DEP parameters. Moreover, in order to improve the electrical stability of the assembled and aligned CNPs based sensing elements, different geometries of micro-electrodes were compared. Experimental results showed that samples prepared by using interdigitated micro-electrodes proved to have better electrical stability than those using a simple pair of micro-electrodes.