Design, Manufacturing, and Testing of Single-Carbon-Nanotube-Based Infrared Sensors

Abstract

As a 1-D nanostructural material, carbon nanotube (CNT) has attracted lot of attention and has been used to build various nanoelectronic devices due to its unique electronic properties. In this paper, a reliable and efficient nanomanufacturing process was developed for building single-CNT-based nanodevices by depositing the CNTs on the substrate surface and then aligning them to bridge the electrode gap using the atomic force microscopy (AFM) based nanomanipulation. With this technology, single CNT-based IR sensors have been fabricated for investigating CNT's electronic and photonic properties. The fabrication of single-CNT-based IR sensors demonstrated the reliability and efficiency of the nanomanufacturing process. Experimental tests on single-multiwalled-CNT-based IR sensors have shown much larger photocurrent and quantum efficiency than other reported studies. It has also been shown that a high signal to dark current ratio can be accomplished by single-walled-CNT (SWNT) based IR sensors. Moreover, the testing of SWNT-bundle-based IR sensors verified that the performance of CNT bundle/film-based nanoelectronic devices was limited by the mixing of semiconducting CNTs and metallic CNTs, as well as the unstable CNT-CNT junctions in a CNT bundle or network.