Metallic Carbon Nanotube Quantum Dots with Broken Symmetries as a Platform for Tunable Terahertz Detection

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that breaking symmetries in metallic carbon nanotube quantum dots enables a broad range of optical transitions, paving the way for tunable, high-temperature terahertz detectors with adjustable frequency response.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach using symmetry-breaking in metallic nanotube quantum dots to achieve tunable terahertz detection across a wide frequency range.

Findings

Symmetry breaking relaxes selection rules and removes degeneracies.

Allowed optical transitions span from 1 THz to tens of THz.

Device performance remains stable up to 100 K.

Abstract

Generating and detecting radiation in the technologically relevant range of the so-called terahertz gap ($0.1 - 10$ THz) is challenging because of a lack of efficient sources and detectors. Quantum dots in carbon nanotubes have shown great potential to build sensitive terahertz detectors usually based on photon-assisted tunnelling. A recently reported mechanism combining resonant quantum dot transitions and tunnelling barriers asymmetries results in a narrow linewidth photocurrent response with a large signal-to-noise ratio under weak THz radiation. That device was sensitive to one frequency, corresponding to transitions between equidistant quantized states. In this work we show, using numerical together with scanning tunnelling spectroscopy studies of a defect-induced metallic zigzag single-walled carbon nanotube quantum dot that simultaneously breaking various symmetries in metallic nanotube quantum dots of arbitrary chirality strongly relaxes the selection rules in the electric dipole approximation, and removes energy degeneracies. This leads to a richer set of allowed optical transitions spanning frequencies from 1 THz to several tens of THz, for a $\sim$10 nm quantum dot. Based on these findings, we propose a terahertz detector device based on a metallic single-walled carbon nanotube quantum dot defined by artificial defects. Depending on its length and contacts transparency, the operating regimes range from a high-resolution gate-tunable terahertz sensor to a broadband terahertz detector. Our calculations indicate that the device is largely unaffected by temperatures up to 100 K, making carbon nanotube quantum dots with broken symmetries a promising platform to design tunable terahertz detectors that could operate at liquid nitrogen temperatures.