Date of Award

Spring 5-2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Micro and Nanoscale Systems

First Advisor

Chester Wilson

Abstract

Carbon nanomaterials have excited both academia and industry with their extraordinary electronic, mechanical, optical, thermal, and chemical properties for over forty years, providing opportunities for significant advances in fundamental and applied science and leading to the development of disruptive technologies and applications. While graphene and carbon nanotubes have been at the forefront of research, a relatively new one-dimensional carbon allotrope, graphene nanoscrolls, will likely play significant roles in future technologies. Graphene nanoscrolls have structures similar to carbon nanotubes with a key difference in that they are not seamless – there are exposed edges along their lengths. As such, they share many of the electronic, mechanical, and thermal properties that have brought so much interest to graphene and carbon nanotubes while offering their own unique features.

The current body of work on graphene nanoscrolls is sparse, with the majority of presented research either being theoretical in nature or pertaining to the synthesis of these nanostructures. This work provides some of the first experimental work into the application of graphene nanoscrolls. New and promising synthesis techniques were experimentally evaluated for scalability and throughput. Preferred synthesis techniques were employed to create back-gated field-effect transistors that utilize graphene nanoscrolls as the channel material. It was shown that extraordinary current densities and room temperature ballistic transport over long channel lengths are achievable. The field-effect transistors were further extended to the application of radiation sensors by functionalizing the graphene nanoscroll channel material with nanoparticles with high radiation interaction probabilities. The developed radiation sensors are shown to be capable of detecting low levels of X-ray, gamma, and neutron radiation with very small footprints and negligible power consumption. Production of these devices are scalable and inexpensive.

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