Phonon-limited transport in carbon nanotubes using the Monte Carlo method

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are at the forefront of current research in nanoelectronics. At the present many questions still exist regarding the transport properties of these materials. The mobility of long (/spl sim/325 /spl mu/m) single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) agrees very well with semiclassical transport simulations involving inelastic phonon scattering. Such a transport model is likely to be valid when the tube length is longer than the momentum relaxation length (L/sub m/), but may give insights into the electronic and phonon properties of nanotubes of all lengths. One may investigate the dependence of L/sub m/, or other important transport properties such as the phonon-limited mobility, on the tube diameter, on surrounding fields, and on the temperature. Monte Carlo simulations require models for the electron and phonon energy as a function of wavevector. The wavevector space of a nanotube is discretized into a large number of 1-D zones, each corresponding to a single electron subband or a single phonon subbranch.