Electrodes for carbon nanotube devices by focused electron beam induced deposition of gold

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Individual carbon nanotubes (CNTs) often occur in randomly dispersed two-dimensional as well as three-dimensional configurations that make device fabrication difficult. Making electrical contact to such CNTs is of practical interest. To this end, we make contact to individual metallic single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) using the focused electron-beam-induced deposition (FEBID) of pure gold. The SWNTs are grown by chemical vapor deposition on a flat substrate, and the gold leads are made through FEBID using inorganic metallic precursor gas, chloro(trifluorophosphine)gold(I), or AuClPF3, in a high vacuum scanning electron microscope. The same scanning electron microscope is also used to image carbon nanotubes, allowing for simultaneous alignment. We find equivalent one-dimensional resistivities for the SWNTs of 10–15kΩ∕μm for both FEBID gold leads and leads deposited using conventional electron-beam lithography (EBL) and thermal evaporation of gold, suggesting similarly low contact resistances. We use electrostatic force microscopy to verify quantitatively similar contact resistances for one nanotube sample, 10(±6) and 54(±6)kΩ, for FEBID and EBL leads, respectively, with most voltage dropping across the long metallic SWNT.