Graphene and hexagonal boron nitride based nano-electronic biosensor

Two dimensional layered single crystal materials have attracted huge attention in the field of Nano-electronics, photovoltaics, and optoelectronics due to their tunable mechanical, electronic, and optical properties. The combination of two single layered materials forms Van der Waal's heterostructure, which can offer structural versatility and engineered functionality of the constituent layers. On the other hand, rapid detection and sequencing of various DNA/RNA nucleobases is a very promising challenge of modern day medical science. In this work, we have investigated the behavior of Graphene and hexagonal boron nitride heterostructure based single electron transistor (SET) devices for the sensing/detection of such nucleobases. First-principles based DFT-NEGF was used for calculating the electrostatic, adsorption, switching, and transport behavior of the system. The presence of a specific molecule within the SET can be identified from respective line scans of the charge stability diagram. The current investigation offers a novel detection methodology for various nucleobase, which is very energy efficient, offers superior detection sensitivity, and has a wide temperature range of operation.

I. Introduction

DNA detection and sequencing [1], [2] of the nucleobase is of large applications in the field of medical, forensic, virology, and biological systematics. In 1970, Sanger [3] developed a method to read a DNA molecule, which is a very expensive and time-consuming process. With the technological advancement traditionally detection technique replaced by Nanopore-based sequencing, proposed by David Deamer and Branton [4], [5], which is cost-effective and offers faster operational speed. Recently studies showed that 2D materials based nanopore are used as an alternative technique to the sequencing of nucleobase [6], [7]. 2D materials can be easily integrating into various nanoelectronic device due to their superior electronic properties, large surface-volume ratio and easy mode of fabrication [21].