Electronic Properties of Carbon Nanotubes studied in Field-Effect Transistor Geometries

Abstract

Due to their outstanding properties carbon nanotubes have attracted considerable research effort during the last decade. While they serve as an example of a 1-dimensional electron system allowing one to study fundamental quantum effects nanotubes-especially semiconducting nanotubes-are an interesting candidate for next-generation transistor application with the potential to replace silicon-based devices. I have fabricated nanotubes using chemical vapor deposition techniques with various catalysts and gas mixtures. The nanotubes produced with these techniques vary in length from 100 nm to several hundreds of micrometers. While data taken on shorter metallic and semiconducting devices show Coulomb blockade effects, the main part of this work is concerned with measurements that shed light on the intrinsic properties of semiconducting nanotubes. On devices with lengths of more than 300 um I have carried out measurements of the intrinsic hole mobility as well as the device-specific field-effect mobility. The mobility measured on these nanotube devices at room temperature exceeds that of any semiconductor known previously. Another important consideration in nanotube transistor applications are hysteresis effects. I present measurements on the time scales involved in some of these hysteresis effects and a possible application of the hysteresis for memory devices.