Mechanism of nanoelectronic switch based on telescoping carbon nanotubes

From ab initio calculations, a nanoelectronic switch is proposed based on telescoping double-walled carbon nanotubes (TDWCNTs), which can be conveniently turned on or off via the relative motion of tubes along the tube axis. It is found that the quantum conductance of switch periodically oscillates with the overlapping length of the two shells of the TDWCNT, which is mainly attributed to the variation of coupling effect between π electronic states of the two shells. The switching of TDWCNTs is determined by the distributions of delocalized frontier molecular orbitals of this system.