Contact resistance of carbon nanotubes

Abstract

There is a pathological contact resistance within an idealized picture of an armchair nanotubes (NT) and free-electron metal. This problem can be eliminated by using a metal with a sufficiently large Fermi wave vector, by introducing scattering in the NT, or by contacting the end of the NT. Whether this is really a crucial factor in NT contact resistance depends on the quantitative magnitudes of various scattering mechanisms, which are difficult to estimate. The decay of electron wave functions across the van der Waals spacing between metal and NT may also be an important factor.