EPJ B – Round-up on the conductivity of carbon nanomaterials

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Published on 11 May 2011

A new Colloquium article by I. Deretzis and A. La Magna published in EPJB reviews the possibilities offered by all-carbon electronics as well as elucidating drawbacks in view of future applications.

The lack of an intrinsic badgap in graphene is what hampers its use in semiconducting devices. The most plausible route toward badgap engineering of this material seems to be confinement in one dimension. I. Deretzis and A. La Magna discuss how various sources of non-ideality in quasi one-dimensional structures, such as graphene nanoribbons, carbon nanotubes and linear carbon chains, can impact on the electronic transport characteristics. The authors also analyze the effect of perturbations and modifications to the structural and electronic symmetry in atomistic descriptions that go beyond phenomenological approaches. The article provides a general formalism for the for the calculation of coherent transport in nanodevices, discusses the quantum transport modeling of defective sp2 systems and looks at the important role of the interaction with metallic contacts.