Abstract Submitted to the    NANOTUBE'04 Conference:

For electronic applications of carbon nanotubes it is necessary to have a good electrical contact between the tube and the electrodes. It is also advantageous for applications to directly grow the nanotubes on electrodes prepared on patterned silicon chips. Most of the investigations of CNT growth were made on non-conducting substrates. These types of substrates are obviously not suitable as electrodes for devices. Therefore, the deposition of a conducting metallic underlayer on the substrate beneath the catalyst is required [1]. In this study we report the growth of carbon nanotubes using plasma-enhanced CVD on substrates with the following configuration: 10nmNi/10nm X/50nm M/ 400nmSi02, where X= insulator (Si, Al2O3) and M = metal (Pt, Pd, Ti, Mo, W, Cr). The experimental growth conditions were reported in [2]. After growth, the samples were characterised by SEM. The contact resistance between the nanotubes and the metal underlayer was measured.

Reference:

[1] H T.Ng et al. J.Phys.Chem. B, 107, 2003, 8484-8489
[2] R.E Morjan et al. Current Appl. Phys., in press, 2003