Disordered Nanomaterials for Chemielectric Vapor Sensing: A Review

Although robust chemical vapor detection by chemielectric point sensors remains as a largely unmet challenge at present, the best performance to date and the most likely avenue for future progress is with sensor designs in which the transductive element is a disordered nanostructured material. We here review the evidence for this claim, with illustrations drawn from recent work on sensors made from gold nanoparticles, carbon nanotubes, and reduced graphene oxide nanoplatelets. These examples can be regarded as being prototypical of disordered nanostructured films formed of primitive objects that are nanoscopic in 3-D, 2-D, and 1-D, respectively.