Effects of Disorder and Momentum Relaxation on the Intertube Transport of Incommensurate Carbon Nanotube Ropes and Multiwall Nanotubes

Abstract

We study theoretically the electrical transport between aligned carbon nanotubes in nanotube ropes, and between shells in multiwall carbon nanotubes. We focus on transport between two metallic nanotubes (or shells) of different chiralities with mismatched Fermi momenta and incommensurate periodicities. We perform numerical calculations of the transport properties of such systems within a tight-binding formalism. For clean (disorder-free) nanotubes the intertube transport is strongly suppressed as a result of momentum conservation. For clean nanotubes, the intertube transport is typically dominated by the loss of momentum conservation at the contacts. We discuss in detail the effects of disorder, which also breaks momentum conservation, and calculate the effects of localised scatterers of various types. We show that physically relevant disorder potentials lead to very dramatic enhancements of the intertube conductance. We show that recent experimental measurements of the intershell transport in multiwall nanotubes are consistent with our theoretical results for a model of short-ranged correlated disorder.

References added

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Analysis of Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes as Waveguides and Antennas in the Infrared and the Visible Regimes
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• Perturbation calculations on interlayer transmission rates from symmetric to antisymmetric channels in parallel armchair nanotube junctions
• Interwall conductance in double-walled armchair carbon nanotubes
• Intertube effects on one-dimensional correlated state of metallic single-wall carbon nanotubes probed by 13C NMR