An Incremental Double Layer Capacitance of a Novel Ring-Disk Electrodes Array for Avidin/Strepavidin Sensing

Electric double layer (EDL) is established by ion redistribution at a solid-liquid interface. This ion redistribution electrically screens solid-surface charges and renders the interface to neutral. As a result, EDL is highly related to the surface potential, and a capacitor or constant phase element (CPE) is always employed to model the relationship between EDL and surface potential. According to this mechanism, diverse applications have been developed by controlling EDL via modulate potential fields or surface modifications. However, most of previous methods are sophisticated and hard to implemented as an in-situ monitoring method. To address this demand, we proposed a ring-disk electrode array (RDA) architecture to detect the changes of EDL capacitance between ring and disk electrode. Based on the proposed architecture, the surface potential will change while the biomolecular is immobilized onto to the vertical nanogap. This effect is verified by immobilizing different charged functional groups and the correlation between the surface potential and incremental-capacitance variance is also demonstrated. Based on this effect, the application for Avidin detection is implemented. The detectable range for Avidin measurement is from 100 fg/ml to 1 ng/ml. Based on this work, the incremental double-layer capacitance of a planar nanogap structure can provide a simple and reliable method for surface potential monitoring and can be used for different chemical and clinical examinations. Figure 1