Study on nitrogen doped carbon atom chains with negative differential resistance effect

Abstract

Recent calculations (Mahmoud and Lugli, 2013, [21]) of gold leads sandwiching carbon chains which are separated by diphenyl–dimethyl demonstrated that the negative differential resistance (NDR) effect appears only for “odd” numbers of carbon atoms. In this paper, according to a first-principles study based on non-equilibrium Green's function combining density functional theory, we find that the NDR effect appears both for “odd” and for “even” numbers of carbon atoms when the chains are doped by nitrogen atom. Our calculations remove the restriction of “odd/even” chains for the NDR effect, which may promise the potential applications of carbon chains in the nano-scale or molecular devices in the future.