Strong Enhancement of High Voltage Electronic Transport in Chiral Electrical Nanotube Superlattices

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that applying a chiral superlattice potential to metallic carbon nanotubes significantly enhances their high-voltage electronic transport by increasing conductance and current sustainability, especially when the superlattice wavevector is near the axial direction.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach of using chiral superlattice potentials to improve high-voltage transport in carbon nanotubes, revealing the role of phonon interactions.

Findings

High-voltage conductance is greatly increased with chiral superlattices.

Electron velocity remains unchanged for superlattices with wavevector near the axial direction.

Enhanced phonon interactions lead to lower electron-phonon scattering probabilities.

Abstract

We consider metallic carbon nanotubes with an overlying unidirectional electrical chiral (wavevector out of the radial direction, where the axial direction is included) superlattice potential. We show that for superlattices with a wavevector close to the axial direction, the electron velocity assumes the same value as for nanotubes without superlattice. Due to an increased number of phonons with different momenta but lower electron-phonon scattering probabilities, we obtain a large enhancement of the high-voltage conductance and current sustainability in comparison with the nanotube without superlattice.