Aligned Graphene Nanoribbons and Crossbars from Unzipped Carbon Nanotubes

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to produce aligned graphene nanoribbons from unzipped carbon nanotubes, enabling the creation of ordered nanoribbon architectures suitable for nanoelectronic applications.

Contribution

The study introduces a polymer-protected Ar plasma etching technique for unzipping aligned CNTs into GNRs and demonstrates the fabrication of GNR crossbars for large-scale nanoelectronics integration.

Findings

80% of CNTs unzipped into sub-10 nm GNRs

GNR devices exhibit on/off ratios up to 10^3 at room temperature

Successful fabrication of GNR-GNR and GNR-CNT crossbars

Abstract

Aligned graphene nanoribbon (GNR) arrays were made by unzipping of aligned single-walled and few-walled carbon nanotube (CNT) arrays. Nanotube unzipping was achieved by a polymer-protected Ar plasma etching method, and the resulting nanoribbon array was transferred onto any substrates. Atomic force microscope (AFM) imaging and Raman mapping on the same CNTs before and after unzipping confirmed that ~80% of CNTs were opened up to form single layer sub-10 nm GNRs. Electrical devices made from the GNRs (after annealing in H2 at high temperature) showed on/off current (Ion/Ioff) ratios up to 103 at room temperature, suggesting semiconducting nature of the narrow GNRs. Novel GNR-GNR and GNR-CNT crossbars were fabricated by transferring GNR arrays across GNR and CNT arrays, respectively. The production of ordered graphene nanoribbon architectures may allow for large scale integration of GNRs into nanoelectronics or optoelectronics.