Evidence for Phonon-Assisted Intertube Electronic Transport in an Armchair Carbon Nanotube Film

Abstract

The electrical conductivity of a macroscopic assembly of nanomaterials is determined through a complex interplay of electronic transport within and between constituent nano-objects. Phonons play dual roles in this situation: their increased populations tend to reduce the conductivity via electron scattering while they can boost the conductivity by assisting electrons to propagate through the potential-energy landscape. Here, we identify a phonon-assisted coherent electron transport process between neighboring nanotubes in temperature-dependent conductivity measurements on a macroscopic film of armchair single-wall carbon nanotubes. Through atomistic modeling of electronic states and calculations of both electronic and phonon-assisted junction conductances, we conclude that phonon-assisted conductance is the dominant mechanism for the observed high-temperature transport. The unambiguous manifestation of coherent intertube dynamics proves a single-chirality armchair nanotube film to be a unique macroscopic solid-state ensemble of nano-objects promising for the development of room-temperature coherent electronic devices.

6 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Charge transport in semiconducting carbon nanotube networks
• Band Structure Dependent Electronic Localization in Macroscopic Films of Single-Chirality Single-Wall Carbon Nanotubes

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Adjudicating Conduction Mechanisms in High Performance Carbon Nanotube Fibers
• A semiclassical nonequilibrium Green's Function approach to electron transport in systems exhibiting electron-phonon couplings
• Stretch-induced tunability of electrical transport properties of three-dimensional graphene-based foam structures