Carbon nanotube gated lateral resonant tunneling field-effect transistors

Abstract

We have produced a lateral resonant tunneling field-effect transistor using a Y-junction multiwalled carbon nanotube as the dual gate on a narrow channel etched from a modulation-doped GaAs∕AlGaAs heterostructure. When the Y-junction nanotube is negatively biased, electrons traveling from source to drain along the channel face a voltage-tunable electrostatic double-barrier potential. We measured the three-terminal IDS(VDS,VGS) characteristics of the device at 4.2 K and observed gate-induced structure in the transconductance and negative differential resistance in the drain current. We interpret the data in terms of resonant tunneling through one-dimensional subbands confined by a self-consistently calculated electrostatic potential.