Electrical transport in doped multiwalled carbon nanotubes

Abstract

The effects of doping, electron coherence, and electron correlation on the transport properties of boron-doped multiwalled carbon nanotubes are studied. Substitutional boron lowers the Fermi level of the tubes and increases the number of participating conduction channels without introducing strong carrier scattering. From 300 to about 50 K, the tubes show metallic behavior with weak electron-phonon coupling. At lower temperatures the resistance increases, and a zero-bias anomaly is observed. The magnetoresistance is now negative indicating the importance of coherent back-scattering processes. The coherence lengths are measured and dephasing is found to involve weakly inelastic electron-electron collisions. The temperature dependence of the resistance as well as the other low temperature observations can be accounted for by one-dimensional weak-localization theory.