Electron Interference Effects on the Conductance of Doped Carbon Nanotubes

Alain Rochefort, Phaedon Avouris

Published 2000-09-21Version 1

We investigate the effects of impurity scattering on the conductance of metallic carbon nanotubes as a function of the relative separation of the impurities. First we compute the conductance of a clean (6,6) tube, and the effect of model gold contacts on this conductance. Then, we compute the effect of introducing a single, two, and three oxygen atom impurities. We find that the conductance of a single-oxygen-doped (6,6) nanotube decreases by about 30 % with respect to that of the perfect nanotube. The presence of a second doping atom induces strong changes of the conductance which, however, depend very strongly on the relative position of the two oxygen atoms. We observe regular oscillations of the conductance that repeat over an O-O distance that corresponds to an integral number of half Fermi-wavelengths ($m\lambda_F/2$). These fluctuations reflect strong electron interference phenomena produced by electron scattering from the oxygen defects whose contribution to the resistance of the tube cannot be obtained by simply summing up their individual contributions.