Local Ar beam irradiation for making tunneling barriers and its application to single electron inverter in multi-wall carbon nanotubes

The local Ar beam irradiation technique has been developed to form reliable tunnel barriers in multi-wall carbon nanotubes (MWNTs). The technique was applied to fabricate single electron transistor (SET) by adjusting the irradiation dose for the tunnel barrier formation. The CMOS-like single electron inverter structure was also fabricated with two SETs connected in series. The inverter-like transfer curve was obtained. However, the gain and the voltage swing were not large enough for the useful inverter, which may be due to the non-uniform characteristics of each SET.