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Published October 15, 2010 | Published
Journal Article Open

Ultimate and practical limits of fluid-based mass detection with suspended microchannel resonators

Abstract

Suspended microchannel resonators (SMRs) are an innovative approach to fluid-based microelectromechanical mass sensing that circumvents complete immersion of the sensor. By embedding the fluidics within the device itself, vacuum-based operation of the resonator becomes possible. This enables frequency shift-based mass detection with high quality factors, and hence sensitivity comparable to vacuum-based micromechanical resonators. Here we present a detailed analysis of the sensitivity of these devices, including consideration of fundamental and practical noise limits, and the important role of binding kinetics in sensing.We demonstrate that these devices show significant promise for protein detection. For larger, biologically-important targets such as rare whole virions, the required analysis time to flow sufficient sample through the sensor can become prohibitively long unless large parallel arrays of sensors or preconcentrators are employed.

Additional Information

© 2010 American Institute of Physics. Received 13 March 2010; accepted 4 July 2010; published online 22 October 2010. We thank colleagues who assisted us with these analyses. Professor John Sader provided an analysis of the onset of mechanical nonlinearity in cantilevers. Jihun Kim performed simulations on bias-induced heating in fluid-filled microchannel resonators. Dr. Igor Bargatin provided valuable discussions on the optimization of thermoelastic actuation and mass detection. Finally we thank Drs. B. W. Axelrod and X. L. Feng for their critical review of the manuscript. We gratefully acknowledge support from DARPA under Grant No. HR001106.

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