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Cotunneling transport in ultra-narrow gold nanowire bundles

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Abstract

We investigate the charge transport in close-packed ultra-narrow (1.5 nm diameter) gold nanowires stabilized by oleylamine ligands. We give evidence of charging effects in the weakly coupled one-dimensional (1D) nanowires, monitored by the temperature and the bias voltage. At low temperature, in the Coulomb blockade regime, the current flow reveals an original cooperative multi-hopping process between 1D-segments of Au-NWs, minimising the charging energy cost. Above the Coulomb blockade threshold voltage and at high temperature, the charge transport evolves into a sequential tunneling regime between the nearestnanowires. Our analysis shows that the effective length of the Au-NWs inside the bundle is similar to the 1D localisation length of the electronic wave function (of the order of 120 nm ± 20 nm), but almost two orders of magnitude larger than the diameter of the nanowire. This result confirms the high structural quality of the Au-NW segments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire National des Champs Magnétiques Intenses, CNRS-INSA-UJF-UPS, UPR3228, 143 avenue de Rangueil, F-31400, Toulouse, France

    Anaïs Loubat, Walter Escoffier & Bertrand Raquet

  2. INSA, UPS, LPCNO (Laboratoire de Physique et Chimie des Nano-Objets), Université de Toulouse, F-31077, Toulouse, France

    Anaïs Loubat, Lise-Marie Lacroix, Guillaume Viau, Reasmey Tan & Julian Carrey

  3. CNRS; UMR5215; LPCNO, F-31077, Toulouse, France

    Anaïs Loubat, Lise-Marie Lacroix, Guillaume Viau, Reasmey Tan & Julian Carrey

  4. Centre d’Elaboration de Matériaux et d’Etudes Structurales, CNRS, 29 rue Jeanne Marvig, F-31077, Toulouse, France

    Bénédicte Warot-Fonrose

Authors
  1. Anaïs Loubat
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  2. Walter Escoffier
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  3. Lise-Marie Lacroix
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  4. Guillaume Viau
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  5. Reasmey Tan
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  7. Bénédicte Warot-Fonrose
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  8. Bertrand Raquet
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Correspondence to Bertrand Raquet.

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Loubat, A., Escoffier, W., Lacroix, LM. et al. Cotunneling transport in ultra-narrow gold nanowire bundles. Nano Res. 6, 644–651 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-013-0340-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-013-0340-8

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