Modeling extended contacts to nanotube and graphene devices

Nemec, Norbert; Tomanek, David; Cuniberti, Gianaurelio

Modeling extended contacts to nanotube and graphene devices

Authors

Nemec, Norbert

Tomanek, David

Cuniberti, Gianaurelio

Description

Carrier injection into carbon nanotubes and graphene nanoribbons, contacted by a metal coating over an arbitrary length, is studied by various means: Minimal models allow for exact analytic solutions which can be transferred to the original system with high precision. Microscopic ab initio calculations of the electronic structure at the carbon-metal interface allow us to extract -- for Ti and Pd as contacting materials -- realistic parameters, which are then used in large scale tight-binding models for transport calculations. The results are shown to be robust against nonepitaxially grown electrodes and general disorder at the interface, as well as various refinements of the model.
13 pages, 13 figures