Nanotube Nanoelectronics:
New Devices and Imaging Electronic Transport
M. S. Fuhrer*, A. Bachtold, J. Nygård, L. Shih, M. Forero, Young-Gui Yoon, Erik H. Anderson, Steven G. Louie, A. Zettl and Paul L. McEuen
Department of Physics, University of California at Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,
Berkeley, CA 94720
This is an abstract
for a presentation given at the
Eighth
Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology.
There will be a link from here to the full article when it is
available on the web.
Nanotubes have opened the possibility of examining electronic transport through single-molecule wires of nanometer diameter with lengths of up to tens of microns - a model system in which to study the physics of electrons in one dimension. The existence of two flavors of nanotube - metallic and semiconducting - has also led to speculation about the possibility of an all-carbon molecular electronics technology. I will discuss the fabrication and properties of nanotube homo- and heterojunctions(1). The junction between two metallic nanotubes has a surprisingly high conductance, which may be understood as a result of compression of the junction by substrate forces, and points to the usefulness of nanotube networks as branching interconnects for molecular-scale devices. The metal-semiconductor junction acts as a nanoscale Schottky diode, and can be used as the basis of a three-terminal rectifier consisting of only a few thousand atoms. I will also discuss new techniques for imaging electronic transport in nanotube devices using a conducting-tip AFM(2). By using electrostatic force microscopy to image the local potential in current-carrying devices, the mean free path in semiconducting and metallic nanotubes has been measured. Individual scattering sites in semiconducting nanotubes can also be studied using scanned-gate microscopy.
- M. S. Fuhrer, et al., Science 288, 494 (2000).
- A. Bachtold, et al., PRL 84, 6082 (2000). Nanotube Nanoelectronics: New Devices and Imaging Electronic Transport
*Corresponding Address:
Michael S. Fuhrer
Department of Physics, University of California at Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Berkeley, CA 94720
Email: [email protected]
Web: http://www.physics.berkeley.edu/research/mceuen
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