Insights into the Interfacial Contact and Charge Transport of Gas-Sensing Liquid Metal Marbles

• DOI: 10.1021/acsami.2c06908
• Publication Date: 2022-06-23T19:46:00Z
• Authors: Yuan Chi; Jialuo Han; Jiewei Zheng; Jiong Yang; Zhenbang Cao; Mohammad B. Ghase...; Md. Arifur Rahim; Kourosh Kalantar-...; Priyank Kumar; Jianbo Tang
• Keywords: Liquid metal; Ohmic contact; Tungsten trioxide

Understanding the interfacial contacts between liquid metals and substrate materials is becoming increasingly important for fast-rising metal-enabled technologies. However, such technologies, probing contact behavior charge transport has remained challenging due to deformable nature of presence surface oxide layer. Here, we encapsulate eutectic gallium indium (EGaIn) micro-/nanodroplets with tungsten trioxide (WO3) nanoparticles form a WO3/EGaIn metal marble network, in which intrinsically semiconducting WO3 governs transport. We investigate structures characteristics under different conditions various gaseous environments. The results suggest that establishing heterostructure leads near-ohmic behaviors also emergence localized plasmon resonance. Density functional theory calculations interface support experiments by revealing atomistic attractions EGaIn alloy O atoms from WO3, resulting Fermi level shift. show efficient network an enhanced gas-sensing response. This work paves way possibility studying other metal/semiconductor applications soft electronics optics.