Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Anatram, M. P..
This viewgraph presentation provides information on the electrical conductivity of carbon nanotubes upon deformation by atomic force microscopy (AFM). The density of states and conductance were computed using four orbital tight-binding method with various parameterizations. Different chiralities develop bandgap that varies with chirality.
The recent report of quantized conductance in a 4 m long multiwalled nanotube (MWNT) raises the exciting possibility of ballistic transport at room temperature over relatively long distances. We argue that this is made possible by the special symmetry of the eigenstates of the lowest propagating modes in metallic nanotubes which suppresses backscattering. This unusual effect is absent for the higher propagating modes so that transport is not ballistic once the bias exceeds the cut-off energy for the higher modes, which is estimated to be approximately 75 meV for nanotubes of diameter approximately 15 nm. Also, we show that the symmetry of the eigenstates can significantly affect their coupling to the reservoir and hence the contact resistance. A simple model is presented that can be used to understand the observed conductance-voltage characteristics.
The linear response conductance of a defect free carbon nanotube connected to ideal contacts is approximately 4e(sup 2)/h. In this paper, we first calculate the conductance characteristics of a uniform tube in the presence of an applied bias by assuring different forms of the potential drop across the wire. It is shown that for long tubes, the conduction mechanism involve a only the four non degenerate subands when the electric field drops slowly across the the tube. We then proceed to calculate the transmission and low bias conductance of tubes with defects. Here, we show that a weak uniform disorder in the tube does not cause a dramatic change in the conductance. However the presence of certain substitutional defects, the transmission coefficient versus energy develops a gap and this can cause a dramatic change in the low bias conductance. The effect of coherence is neglected.