Full text
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| Author(s): |
Mariana Rossi Carvalho
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Master's Dissertation |
| Press: | São Paulo. |
| Institution: | Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Instituto de Física (IF/SBI) |
| Defense date: | 2007-03-23 |
| Examining board members: |
Antonio Jose Roque da Silva;
Alex Antonelli;
Antonio Domingues dos Santos
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| Advisor: | Antonio Jose Roque da Silva |
| Abstract | |
The motivation for the present work was the experimental measure taken in 2004, reported in Reference [1], which showed that carbon nanotubes doped with nitrogens were sensitive to ammonia in such a way as to show a resistance increase when exposed to this gas. This sensitivity makes them good candidates for the fabrication of sensors. Ab initio calculations were made with the SIESTA [2] program using the DFT [3, 4] formalism in the GGA [5] approximation, in order to study the electronic structure of the defect proposed by the experimentalists, composed by three pyridine-like rings surrounding a vacancy. The simulations were made for a (5, 5) nanotube with approximately 140 atoms. The supercell approximation with periodic boundary conditions and norm-conserved pseudopotentials were used. The ammonia molecule binds to the above mentioned defect with an energy of ?0.26 eV. In this process, it dissociates spontaneously into an ammina (NH2) group and a hydrogen, each binding to one of the nitrogens of the defect. The transmittance of this system was calculated with the TRANSAMPA program [6], which uses the non-equilibrium Green?s functions formalism [6?8] to caculate the charge transport. The result we obtained was that the transmittance of the system bound to the ammonia molecule is greater than the one of the unbound system, which is contrary to the experimental observation. We began a systematic study to determine which were the most stable (i.e. the ones with lower formation energy) structures for substitutional nitrogen defects in carbon nanotubes. These calculations were made for 16 defects in the (5,5) tube, 3 in the (8,0) tube and 3 in the graphene sheet. For the (8, 0) nanotube we made use of approximately 160 atoms and for the graphene sheet, around 162. The defect, composed by four pyridine-like rings surrounding two vacancies, was the most stable in the three systems, for nitrogen chemical potentials in the range found in the experiments (?N > 0.5 eV, where ?N = 0.0 eV refers to the nitrogen chemical potential in the N2 molecule). Ammonia binds to this new defect with a slightly exotermic binding energy of ?0.02 eV and dissociates itself in the same way as in the ?three nitrogens plus one vacancy\" defect. The transmittance of the bound system was then again calculated and showed lower values than the ones for the unbound system, which aggrees with the measure of increase in resistance observed by the experimentalists. (AU) | |