Mid-infrared gas sensor based on hybrid graphene nanostructures and ultrathin gas-adsorbing polymer

Graphene displays outstanding properties with its mid-infrared plasmons, such as extreme light compression and unique optical tunability via graphene doping. This leads to powerful molecular detection with improved sensitivity by having minute molecule amounts within the confined plasmon volume (typically, 10-15 nm field decay length from graphene surface [1] ) of nanostructured graphene. In recent years, graphene plasmonics has been successfully demonstrated to probe biomolecules, e.g. incubated proteins [2] . In contrast, efficient gas detection is hampered due to vastly dispersed nature of gas molecules with almost negligible contact with graphene surface. In our work, we present a novel plasmon-based gas sensing scheme by employing a gas-adsorbing polymer that is deposited atop graphene nanostructures [3] .