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Tuning the conductance of single-walled carbon nanotubes by ion irradiation in the Anderson localization regime

Nature Materials volume 4, pages 534–539 (2005)Cite this article

Abstract

Carbon nanotubes1,2 are a good realization of one-dimensional crystals where basic science and potential nanodevice applications merge3. Defects are known to modify the electrical resistance of carbon nanotubes4; they can be present in as-grown carbon nanotubes, but controlling their density externally opens a path towards the tuning of the electronic characteristics of the nanotube. In this work, consecutive Ar+ irradiation doses are applied to single-walled nanotubes (SWNTs) producing a uniform density of defects. After each dose, the room-temperature resistance versus SWNT length (R(L)) along the nanotube is measured. Our data show an exponential dependence of R(L) indicating that the system is within the strong Anderson localization regime. Theoretical simulations demonstrate that mainly di-vacancies contribute to the resistance increase induced by irradiation, and that just a 0.03% of di-vacancies produces an increase of three orders of magnitude in the resistance of a SWNT of 400 nm length.

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Figure 1: Experimental setup.
Figure 2: Effect of consecutive irradiations on the electrical resistance.
Figure 4: Localization length: experimental and theoretical results.
Figure 3: Simulated resistance versus length for a fixed density of defects.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Sidney Davison and Ron Reifenberger for careful reading and Jose Ortega for helping with numerical methods. This work was partially supported by Spanish MCyT under contracts MAT2004-05589-C02-02, MAT2001-00665 and MAT2002-01534 and the European Community IST-2001-38052 and NMP4-CT-2004-500198 grants. B. B. is indebted to MEC (Spain) for a F.P.U. fellowship. Computing time for some of these calculations in the Centro de Computación Científica de la UAM is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Física de la Materia Condensada, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, E-28049, Spain

    C. Gómez-Navarro, P. J. De Pablo & J. Gómez-Herrero

  2. Departamento de Física Teórica de la Materia Condensada, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, E-28049, Spain

    B. Biel, F. J. Garcia-Vidal & F. Flores

  3. Departamento de Física de Materiales, Universidad del País Vasco UPV/EHU and Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC), San Sebastián, E-20018, Spain

    A. Rubio

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Correspondence to J. Gómez-Herrero.

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Gómez-Navarro, C., Pablo, P., Gómez-Herrero, J. et al. Tuning the conductance of single-walled carbon nanotubes by ion irradiation in the Anderson localization regime. Nature Mater 4, 534–539 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat1414

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