Study of Electromechanicalproperties and Applications of Carbon Nanotubes

Nanoelectronic devices: nanoparticles or fibers can be integrated into smart devices and has broad applications in variety of fields, such as computer chips, nano-sensor, electrical switching, emission amplification, and more efficient solar cells. Carbon-based nanomaterials are intentionally produced fullerenes, which involve carbon nanotubes and buckyballs (National Geographic 2014). For carbon-based nanomaterial, their novel electronic, optical, mechanical and thermal properties are strongly structural and conformational dependent, such as the size, the length and the chirality. Various synthesis methods and techniques are developed for obtaining purity, optimized nanomaterial structure and physical orientation for specific application. The indentation of nanotubes was simulated using an AFM tip. The electronic structure and transport response to the mechanical deformations were investigated for different deflection points starting from perfect unperturbed systems up to the point where the first bonds break. We found the dependence of the force constant on the diameter size: the smaller the diameter, the larger the k. For the metallic-armchair tubes, with diameters from 8 to 13 Å, the conductance decreases only slightly under radial deformation, and a tiny band gap opening of up to 50 meV was observed.