1999/06/04 by Paul L. McEuen, Marc Bockrath, David H. Cobden +4 · 448 citations
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Carbon Nanotubes in Composites #Carbon fibers #Carbon nanotube #Composite material #Condensed matter physics #Doping #Graphene research and applications #Magnetic field #Magnetoresistance #Materials science #Mean free path #Metal #Nanotechnology #Optics #Optoelectronics #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Scattering #Thermal properties of materials #Weak localization #cond-mat.mes-hall
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.83.5098
published in Physical Review Letters 83(24), 5098-5101 (American Physical Society) · four pages
arxiv created 1999/06/04 · openalex publication_date 1999/12/13 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We address the effects of disorder on the conducting properties of metal and semiconducting carbon nanotubes. Experimentally, the mean free path is found to be much larger in metallic tubes than in doped semiconducting tubes. We show that this result can be understood theoretically if the disorder potential is long ranged. The effects of a pseudospin index that describes the internal sublattice structure of the states lead to a suppression of scattering in metallic tubes, but not in semiconducting tubes. This conclusion is supported by tight-binding calculations.