Nanoporous Metals Incorporated into MEMS and NEMS Devices for Enhanced Functionality

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The research objective of this award is the incorporation of nanoporous gold into micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and nano-electro-mechanical systems (NEMS). Nanoporous gold is fabricated by selectively dissolving silver from a gold-silver metal alloy using various chemical etchants. The resulting nanoporous gold films will be several hundred nanometers in thickness and will have pores and interconnecting ligaments that are between 5 and 50 nanometers. Nanoporous gold is a particularly desirable system because of its resistance to corrosion and oxidation and also because the gold surface can be tailored or functionalized to be sensitive to adsorption by various biological and chemical agents. The nanoscale and microscale devices to be fabricated in this project will consist of layered cantilever beams, with one of the layers consisting of nanoporous gold and the other layer consisting of various different materials depending upon the application. When chemicals or biological species come into contact with the nanoporous gold, the cantilever beam will develop a curvature which can be detected using various optical methods. If successful, the results of this research will lead a set of scalable methods and techniques that are amenable to the large-scale fabrication of submicron sensors and actuators using nanoporous metal films. This will enable the fabrication of various sensors and actuators which could have direct application in many different areas such as chemical and biological sensing and actuation and control of MEMS and NEMS devices.