Professor Phil Collins
UC Irvine

Scaffolding Carbon Nanotubes into Single-Molecule Circuitry

Abstract:

As electronic devices shrink to the nanometer scale, the relative importance of individual chemical bonds becomes larger and larger. Carbon nanotubes represent an extreme limit of this rule. In their pristine form, nanotubes can carry electrical current with virtually no scattering or resistance, but the modification of a single lattice site can dramatically change this situation. We have developed techniques for finding, creating, and altering single defect sites in nanotubes, and this presentation will focus on this single-site experimentation. We will demonstrate the correspondence between chemical activity and local resistance, and take advantage of both to build environmentally robust, single-molecule circuits. The work confirms the expectation that defect sites may be critical to understanding and controlling variability, noise, and chemical sensitivity in nanoscale electronic devices.