Protecting nanotubes from static electricity.

• Position: Circuitry - Brief Article

Carbon nanotubes have the potential to be used for smaller and faster computer chips, but static electricity poses serious problems with nanoscale elements in a circuit. Static electricity has long been a problem for conventional chips and electronic devices, but it is especially severe for nanotubes because of their extreme shapes. (Nanotubes are often micrometers long and only a few billionths of a meter in diameter.) A small zap of static electricity destabilizes the nanotubes, making them useless as a semiconductor.

To find out how severe the situation is, Pawel Keblinski, assistant professor of material science and engineering, and Saroj Nayak, assistant professor of physics, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.Y., combined quantum mechanics in theoretical computer simulations with classical electrostatics analysis. They found that the electrostatic charge is concentrated at the tube ends. The charge eventually destroys the entire nanotube.

The researchers then calculated the maximum charge the tube can...