Electron transport in very clean, as-grown suspended carbon nanotubes

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Abstract
Single-walled carbon nanotubes have shown a wealth of quantum transport phenomena thus far 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11 . Defect-free, unperturbed single-walled carbon nanotubes with well behaved or tunable metal contacts are important for probing the intrinsic electrical properties of nanotubes. Meeting these conditions experimentally is non-trivial owing to numerous disorder and randomizing factors. Here we show that ∼ 1-μm-long fully suspended single-walled carbon nanotubes grown in place between metal contacts afford devices with well defined characteristics over much wider energy ranges than nanotubes pinned on substrates. Various low-temperature transport regimes in true-metallic, small- and large-bandgap semiconducting nanotubes are observed, including quantum states shell-filling, -splitting and -crossing in magnetic fields owing to the Aharonov–Bohm effect. The clean transport data show a correlation between the contact junction resistance and the various transport regimes in single-walled-carbon-nanotube devices. Furthermore, we show that electrical transport data can be used to probe the band structures of nanotubes, including nonlinear band dispersion.
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