Yunfan Guo, Enzheng Shi, Jiadi Zhu, Pin-Chun Shen, Jiangtao Wang, Yuxuan Lin, Yunwei Mao, Shibin Deng, Baini Li, Ji-Hoon Park, Ang-Yu Lu, Shuchen Zhang, Qingqing Ji, Zhe Li, Chenguang Qiu, Song Qiu, Qingwen Li, Letian Dou, Yue Wu, Jin Zhang, Tomás Palacios, Anyuan Cao & Jing Kong

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-021–01034‑8

Abstract:

The assembly of single-walled carbon nanotubes (CNTs) into high-density horizontal arrays is strongly desired for practical applications, but challenges remain despite myriads of research efforts. Herein, we developed a non-destructive soft-lock drawing method to achieve ultraclean single-walled CNT arrays with a very high degree of alignment (angle standard deviation of ~0.03°). These arrays contained a large portion of nanometre-sized CNT bundles, yielding a high packing density (~400 µm−1) and high current carrying capacity (1.8 × 108 A cm2). This alignment strategy can be generally extended to diverse substrates or sources of raw single-walled CNTs. Significantly, the assembled CNT bundles were used as nanometre electrical contacts of high-density monolayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) transistors, exhibiting high current density (~38 µA µm−1), low contact resistance (~1.6 kΩ µm), excellent device-to-device uniformity and highly reduced device areas (0.06 µm2 per device), demonstrating their potential for future electronic devices and advanced integration technologies.