AVS 46th International Symposium
    Electronic Materials and Processing Division Wednesday Sessions
       Session EM-WeA

Invited Paper EM-WeA9
Carbon Nanotubes - a New Class of 1D Conductors

Wednesday, October 27, 1999, 4:40 pm, Room 608

Session: Novel Materials and Devices for Computation and Communication
Presenter: P.L. McEuen, University of California, Berkeley and LBNL
Correspondent: Click to Email
Carbon nanotubes are single graphene sheets rolled into nanometer diameter cylinders. They are a new class of one-dimensional conductors that can be either metallic or semiconducting, depending upon their structural details. In this talk, I will discuss experiments by our group to probe the electrical properties of these fascinating systems. Wires are attached to individual tubes and a nearby gate is used to control the charge per unit length of the tube. If the tube is semiconducting, the resulting device operates as the world's smallest transistor. For a metallic tube, behavior characteristic of a correlated electron state known as a Luttinger liquid is found. Short tubes act like one-dimensional boxes for electrons whose quantized energy levels and spin states can be probed. Crossed metal and semiconducting tubes act as ultra-small Schottky diodes. As these experiments show, nanotubes offer an unprecedented opportunity to explore the physics and technology of the one-dimensional electron gas.