A novel graphene based terahertz biometric sensors for increased security and sustainability

Important results from the project

The specific goal of the project was to contribute to the Global goal 9.4 of upgrading all industry and infrastructure for increased sustainability. A novel process of production of low-cost graphene from any renewable biomass sources makes the amount of available graphene practically unlimited. The proposed pioneering idea suggests replacing the CMOS capacitive fingerprint sensors, currently used in smartphones, by the graphene based terahertz sensors. The feasibility of this idea was demonstrated in the project Activity 3, which fulfils the purpose and goal of the project.

Expected long term effects

The project resulted in clear theoretical and experimental demonstration of feasibility of using the proposed concept of the terahertz radiation/detection for advanced fingerprint imaging and, in particular, the developed graphene based terahertz biometric sensors for the next generation smartphone authentication. The results, combining enhancement of sustainability and authentication security, can contribute to prospective directions and sustainable development of the national and international industry in the area of the biometric authentication systems.

Approach and implementation

The project was implemented through the following specific activities: i) Analysis of feasibility of the concept, where the comprehensive survey of the published related theoretical and experimental studies has been done; ii) Initial experimental test of the idea, where the concept of high-resolution terahertz fingerprint imaging was verified experimentally and iii) Test of the idea using in-house flexible graphene terahertz receivers, where two prospective approaches of the terahertz fingerprint imaging using graphene based THz detectors have been proposed and analyzed.