Carbon Particle-Doped Polymer Layers on Metals as Chemically and Mechanically Resistant Composite Electrodes for Hot Electron Electrochemistry

This paper presents a simple and inexpensive method to fabricate chemically and mechanically resistant hot electron-emitting composite electrodes on reusable substrates. In this study, the hot electron emitting composite electrodes were manufactured by doping a polymer, nylon 6,6, with few different brands of carbon particles (graphite, carbon black) and by coating metal substrates with the aforementioned composite ink layers with different carbon-polymer mass fractions. The optimal mass fractions in these composite layers allowed to fabricate composite electrodes that can inject hot electrons into aqueous electrolyte solutions and clearly generate hot electron-induced electrochemiluminescence (HECL). An aromatic terbium (III) chelate was used as a probe that is known not to be excited on the basis of traditional electrochemistry but to be efficiently electrically excited in the presence of hydrated electrons and during injection of hot electrons into aqueous solution. Thus, the presence of hot, pre-hydrated or hydrated electrons at the close vicinity of the composite electrode surface were monitored by HECL. The study shows that the extreme pH conditions could not damage the present composite electrodes. These low-cost, simplified and robust composite electrodes thus demonstrate that they can be used in HECL bioaffinity assays and other applications of hot electron electrochemistry.