Strong localization in defective carbon nanotubes: a recursive Green's function study

Abstract

We study the transport properties of defective single-walled armchair carbon nanotubes (CNTs) on a mesoscopic length scale. Monovacancies and divancancies are positioned randomly along the CNT. The calculations are based on a fast, linearly scaling recursive Green's function formalism that allows us to treat large systems quantum-mechanically. The electronic structure of the CNT is described by a density-functional-based tight-binding model. We determine the influence of the defects on the transmission function for a given defect density by statistical analysis. We show that the system is in the regime of strong localization (i.e. Anderson localization). In the limit of large disorder the conductance scales exponentially with the number of defects. This allows us to extract the localization length. Furthermore, we study in a systematic and comprehensive way, how the conductance, the conductance distribution, and the localization length depend on defect probability, CNT diameter, and temperature.

References in corpus (2)

• Charge Transport in Disordered Graphene-Based Low Dimensional Materials
• Ab initio study of transport properties in defected carbon nanotubes: an O(N) approach

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Electronic transport in metallic carbon nanotubes with mixed defects within the strong localization regime
• Improved recursive Green's function formalism for quasi one-dimensional systems with realistic defects
• Influence of defect-induced deformations on electron transport in carbon nanotubes
• Electronic transport through defective semiconducting carbon nanotubes
• Two-field models in the presence of impurities
• Quantum transport in graphene nanoribbon networks: complexity reduction by a network decimation algorithm
• An improved Green's function algorithm applied to quantum transport in carbon nanotubes
• Quantum localization and electronic transport in covalently functionalized carbon nanotubes