Professor Marc Bockrath
California Institute of Technology

 

Carbon nanoelectronics and sensors

In my talk I will discuss a number of our ongoing research projects on carbon nanotubes and graphene, with the goals of studying fundamental physics in nanostructures as well as developing sensing and device applications. In particular, I will highlight our recent results that demonstrated (1) individual carbon nanotube nanomechanical resonators as atomic-scale resolution inertial mass sensors, with the prospects for single atomic mass unit sensitivity and chemical or isotope discrimination; (2) non-volatile graphene atomic switches, which we understand by a model of electric field driven motion of single-atom wide chains of carbon, with the potential for high density, long term storage of information; and (3) strongly correlated electron behavior in ultra-clean carbon nanotubes, specifically, one-dimensional Wigner crystallization of dilute holes in semiconducting nanotubes, and the formation of a 1D Mott insulator in nominally metallic nanotubes, indicating that carbon nano tubes are never truly metallic. Our results demonstrate nanotubes' promise for studying a variety of tunable correlated electron phenomena in 1D.