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Electron transport in very clean, as-grown suspended carbon nanotubes

Nature Materials volume 4, pages 745–749 (2005)Cite this article

Abstract

Single-walled carbon nanotubes have shown a wealth of quantum transport phenomena thus far1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11. Defect-free, unperturbed single-walled carbon nanotubes with well behaved or tunable metal contacts are important for probing the intrinsic electrical properties of nanotubes. Meeting these conditions experimentally is non-trivial owing to numerous disorder and randomizing factors. Here we show that ∼1-μm-long fully suspended single-walled carbon nanotubes grown in place between metal contacts afford devices with well defined characteristics over much wider energy ranges than nanotubes pinned on substrates. Various low-temperature transport regimes in true-metallic, small- and large-bandgap semiconducting nanotubes are observed, including quantum states shell-filling, -splitting and -crossing in magnetic fields owing to the Aharonov–Bohm effect. The clean transport data show a correlation between the contact junction resistance and the various transport regimes in single-walled-carbon-nanotube devices. Furthermore, we show that electrical transport data can be used to probe the band structures of nanotubes, including nonlinear band dispersion.

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Figure 1: Suspended SWNTs.
Figure 2: A suspended quasi-metallic SWNT (the same as Dev1 in Fig. 1) in magnetic fields.
Figure 3: A second suspended quasi-metallic SWNT (Dev2).
Figure 4: Contacts and properties of various types of suspended nanotube.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by MARCO Focused Research Center on Materials, Structures and Devices and a NSF NIRT.

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  1. Department of Chemistry and Laboratory for Advanced Materials, Stanford University, Stanford, California, 94305, USA

    Jien Cao, Qian Wang & Hongjie Dai

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  1. Jien Cao
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  2. Qian Wang
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  3. Hongjie Dai
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Correspondence to Hongjie Dai.

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Cao, J., Wang, Q. & Dai, H. Electron transport in very clean, as-grown suspended carbon nanotubes. Nature Mater 4, 745–749 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat1478

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