Pure Carbon Nanoscale Devices: Nanotube Heterojunctions

Abstract

Introduction of pentagon-heptagon pair defects into the hexagonal network of a single carbon nanotube can change the helicity of the tube and alter its electronic structure. Using a tight-binding method to calculate the electronic structure of such systems we show that they behave as nanoscale metal/semiconductor or semiconductor/semiconductor junctions. These junctions could be the building blocks of nanoscale electronic devices made entirely of carbon.

Energy Gaps in Graphene Nanoribbons

“…These results reproduce our ab initio calculation results very well. The electronic structure of nanoscale carbon materials such as fullerenes and carbon nanotubes has been the subject of intensive research during the past two decades [1] because of fundamental scientific interest in nanomaterials and because of their versatile electronic properties that are expected to be important for future nanoelectronics [2,3]. Among the carbon nanostructures, a simple variation of graphene, ribbons with nanometer sized widths, has been studied extensively [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15].…”

Nanomechanics of carbon nanotubes

“…According to electronic properties, nanotubes can be semiconducting or metallic, depending on the chirality (Mintmire et al 1992;Saito et al 1992;Blase et al 1994;Chico et al 1996). CNTs are always produced with a distribution of chiralities and electrical properties over which there is no real control.…”

Correlated transport and non-Fermi-liquid behavior in single-wall carbon nanotubes

“…Such a change typically introduces a metal-insulator interface. By combining a kink and its antikink (dislocation pair), it is possible to form local metal-insulator-metal junctions [30]. Transport is then dominated by tunnel events through this barrier.…”