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.

arXiv commentReferences added

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• Improving the conductance of carbon nanotube networks through resonant momentum exchange
• Graphene-based nanodynamometer
• Conductance of telescoped double-walled nanotubes from perturbation calculations
• Beyond the Linearity of Current-Voltage Characteristics in Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes
• Disorder-induced superconductivity in ropes of carbon nanotubes
• Perturbation calculations on interlayer transmission rates from symmetric to antisymmetric channels in parallel armchair nanotube junctions
• Interwall conductance in double-walled armchair carbon nanotubes
• Valley current filtering and reversal by parallel side contacted armchair nanotubes
• Relation between dispersion lines and conductance of telescoped armchair double-wall nanotubes analyzed using perturbation formulas and first-principles calculations
• Intertube effects on one-dimensional correlated state of metallic single-wall carbon nanotubes probed by 13C NMR