Virtual Design and Analysis of
Nanometer-Scale Sensor
and Device Components1
D.W. Brenner*,
J.P. Mewkill, O.A. Shenderova,
J.D. Schall, K. Jarausch and P. E. Russell
Department
of Materials Science and Engineering
North Carolina State
University, Raleigh, NC, 27695-7907
This is an abstract
for a talk to be given at the
Fifth
Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology.
The speaker has also made this abstract available at
http://www.mat.ncsu.edu/CompMatSci/Abstracts/foresight97.html
There will be a link from here to the full article when it is
available on the web.
 Results of atomistic simulations and
theoretical analyses of three nanometer-scale sensor and device
components will be discussed. The first is a Schottky diode,
illustrated in the figure to the right, formed by chemisorption
of molecular species to the outside of a finite region of a
fullerene tubule. Results of tight-binding calculations will be
used to illustrate how boundary conditions for pi electrons can
be influenced by chemisorption, and to compare characteristics of
these junctions to more traditional interfaces.
 The second system to be discussed is a
nanometer-scale pump in which Lorentz forces acting on ions are
used to induce and control flow. A system of this type,
illustrated in the figure to left, will be described that uses an
external applied magnetic field and an electric field induced by
a scanning-probe microscope tip to motivate ion flow in an
electrically-insulating tubule. Predictions of flow rates,
velocity profiles, and effective viscosities from
molecular-dynamics simulations of a Lennard-Jones fluid will be
presented.
 The final series of simulations to be
discussed have been designed to examine whether atomic-force
microscopy can be used as a nondestructive, nanoscale probe of
surface stress distributions. Relationships between surface
stress at the point of tip contact and the elastic modulus
obtained from elastic loading curves assuming Hertzian behavior
for a model tip indenting a gold surface (illustrated to the
right) will be presented.
1Funded by the NASA-Ames Computational
Nanotechnology Program through grant NAG 2-1119 and the National
Science Foundation through grant DMR-9502586.
*Corresponding Address:
Donald W. Brenner, Tel. (919) 515-1338, Fax. (919) 515-7724,
email: [email protected],
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