Tunneling behavior of bismuth telluride nanoplates in electrical transport

TL;DR

This study investigates the electrical transport and tunneling behavior of bismuth telluride nanoplates, revealing symmetric and two-step tunneling phenomena influenced by disorder, through experimental and theoretical analysis.

Contribution

It presents the first combined experimental and theoretical analysis of tunneling behavior in Bi2Te3 nanoplates, highlighting disorder effects on tunneling characteristics.

Findings

Symmetric tunneling observed in experiments and theory.

Two-step tunneling behavior linked to disorder.

Nonmetallic temperature dependence of resistance.

Abstract

We study the electrical transport properties of ensembles of bismuth telluride (Bi2Te3) nanoplates grown by solution based chemical synthesis. Devices consisting of Bi2Te3 nanoplates are fabricated by surface treatment after dropping the solution on the structured gold plates and the temperature dependence of resistance shows a nonmetallic behavior. Symmetric tunneling behavior in I-V was observed in both our experimental results and theoretical calculation of surface conductance based on a simple Hamiltonian, which excludes carrier-carrier interactions. Here, we present two devices: one showing symmetric, the other showing a two-step tunneling behavior. The latter can be understood in terms of disorder.