FET Properties of Surface Silylated Single Wall Carbon Nanotubes

Abstract

ABSTRACTSingle wall carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) having semiconducting properties are promising as electronic materials for nano-scale devices in the future, and the electrical properties of SWNTs are of significantly fundamental and practical interests. It is well known that the field effect transistors (FETs) fabricated using semiconducting SWNTs show high performance in terms of the mobility. However, carriers in pristine SWNTs are mostly holes and, therefore, SWNTs -FETs usually show p-type properties. As for SWNTs, chemical carrier doping has been reported so far for controlling carrier concentration like graphite intercalations. Two major techniques in SWNTs are generally possible; one is endohedral doping and the other is the exohedral chemical modifications. It has been exemplified that doping with alkali metals can introduce electron carriers into SWNTs. Furthermore, the electrical transport properties of SWNTs were reported to be controlled by the endohedral insertion of organic molecules inside the SWNTs. A similar carrier doping could exohedrally be possible when the SWNTs surface is chemically modified. With such chemical modifications, the charge transfer from the substituent groups to SWNTs will be expected and this could modify the electronic states of SWNTs. We reported the FET properties of individual SWNTs exohedrally modified by Si-containing organic moieties, and demonstrated that p-type nanotubes can be converted to n-type ones. However, because of ununiformity of the surface-chemical modifications of SWNTs, the true effects of the exohedral modifications on FET properties were extremely difficult to be evaluated. In this meeting, we will present comparison of the FET properties of the exohedrally silylated SWNTs between separated individual and spread-sheet samples. For evaluating the FET properties, the chemically modified SWNTs have been dispersed on a FET substrate, and the measurements have been carried out at ambient temperature using a conventional method for a separated SWNTs and a spread-sheet SWNTs film. As a reference, the experiments were also made in the same manner on chemically non-modified CNTs. From the experimental results, it will be demonstrated that an n-type property can be enhanced by the exohedral modifications both in the case of the spread-sheet samples and in the case of the individual ones. We will discuss the effects of surface silylation on the electronic states of these SWNTs.