Selective excitations of trasverse vibrational modes of a carbon nanotube through a "shuttle-like" electromechanical instability

Abstract

We study the dynamics of transverse oscillations of a suspended carbon nanotube into which current is injected from the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM). In this case the correlations between the displacement of the nanotube and its charge state, determined by the position-dependent electron tunneling rate, can lead to a "shuttle-like" instability for the transverse vibrational modes. We find that selective excitation of a specific mode can be achieved by an accurate positioning of the STM tip. This result suggests a feasible way to control the dynamics of this nano-electromechanical system (NEMS) based on the "shuttle instability".

revised version, 5 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (3)

• A tunable carbon nanotube electromechanical oscillator
• Giving electrons a ride: nanomechanical electron shuttles
• Self-organization of irregular NEM vibrations in multi-mode shuttle structures

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Selective self-excitation of higher vibrational modes of graphene nano-ribbons and carbon nanotubes through magnetomotive instability