3D hopping conduction in SnO 2 nanobelts

The temperature dependence of the electrical transport of an individual tin oxide nanobelt was measured in darkness from 400 to 5 K. We found four intrinsic electrical transport mechanisms through the nanobelt. It starts with thermally activated conduction between 400 K and 314 K, followed by nearest‐neighbor hopping conduction between 268 K and 115 K and variable range hopping conduction below 58 K, with a crossover from the 3D Mott to the 3D Efros–Shklovskii regime at 16 K. We claim that this sequence reveals the three‐dimensional nature of the electrical transport in the SnO 2 nanobelts, even though they are expected to behave as one‐dimensional systems. (© 2012 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)