Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) have many interesting properties; they may be metallic or semiconducting depending on their diameter and helicity of the graphene sheet. Hydrostatic or quasi-hydrostatic high pressures can probe many electronic features. Resistance - temperature measurements in SWNTs from normal condition and under 0.4 GPa of quasi-hydrostatic pressures reveal a semiconducting-like behavior. From 0.5 to about 2.0 GPa the resistance changes to a Kondo-like feature due to magnetic impurities used to catalyse the nanotube formation. Above 2.0 GPa, they become metallic and at about 2.4 GPa the resistance decreases dramatically around 3 K suggesting a superconducting transition.
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0312307,
title = {Electronic behavior in mats of single-walled carbon nanotubes under pressure},
author = {R. Falconi and J. A. Azamar and R. Escudero},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0312307},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
14 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Solid State Communications