Ultrasensitive Acoustic Detection Using an Enlarged Fabry–Perot Cavity with a Graphene Diaphragm

For exerting high sensitivity of ultrathin graphene to detection deformation, an enlarged backing air cavity (EBC) structure is developed to further enhance the mechanical sensitivity (S_M) of a graphene-based Fabry-Perot (F-P) acoustic sensor. COMSOL acoustic field simulation on the air cavity size-dependent S_M confirms the optimal length and radius of the EBC of 0.2 and 1.5 mm, respectively, with the maximum simulation S_M of 26.16 nm/Pa@1 kHz. Acoustic experiments further demonstrate that the frequency response of the fabricated graphene-based F-P acoustic sensor after the use of the EBC is enhanced by 5.73-79.33 times in the range of 0.5-18 kHz, compared with the conventional one without the EBC. Especially the maximum S_M is up to 187.32 nm/Pa@16 kHz, which is at least 17% higher than the S_M values ranging from 1.1 to 160 nm/Pa in previously reported F-P acoustic sensors using various diaphragm materials. More acoustic characteristics are examined to highlight various merits of the EBC structure, including a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 60-75 dB@0.5-18 kHz, a time stability of less than ±1.3% for 90 min, a detection resolution of 0.01 Hz, and a high-fidelity speech detection with a cross-correlation coefficient of greater than 0.9, thereby revealing its high-performance weak acoustic sensing and speech recognition applications.