| Carbon nanotubes are good candidates for future applications, including nanoelectronic and nanophotonic devices. Their quasi-one dimensional (1D) character offers appealing device properties. These include reduced carrier scattering, carrier mobility up to two orders of magnitude higher than that of materials used in state-of-the-art computer chips today, current densities rivaling those of the best semiconductors, enhanced optical absorption, and band gaps tunable with tube diameter and doping. Recent breakthroughs in research point to the possibility of placing nanotubes precisely on substrates with densities approaching that of transistors on today's computer chips in a way that's integratable with existing Si-based technology. Such advances may accelerate the day when high-speed and power-efficient applications using carbon nanotubes as the transistor channel can become a reality.;Thus the need to explore the fundamental properties of carbon nanotubes becomes more pressing. Using single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNT) p-n diodes as the medium, the purpose of this work is to examine SWNT fundamental properties that little experimental work has dealt with measuring. These properties include the band-gap of a SWNT, band-gap renormalization (shrinkage) as a function of doping, and optical absorption in the infrared region of the spectrum. This dissertation also shows the extreme sensitivity of carbon nanotubes to their environment (i.e. exposure to air). In addition, it demonstrates a new technique—current annealing—that can reverse the degradation of the electrical and optical properties of carbon nanotube diodes due to ambient exposure. |
