Incollection,
The distribution of the electrical resistances of disordered nanowires
Abstract Book of the XXIII IUPAP International Conference on Statistical Physics, Genova, Italy, (9-13 July 2007)
Abstract
Motivated by recent experiments on nanowires and carbon nanotubes, we study theoretically the effect of strong, point-like impurities on the electrical resistance $R$ of finite nanowires in the low-field regime. We characterize the statistical distributions of $R$, which has huge sample-to-sample fluctuations, in the temperature regimes built up by Coulomb blockade and cotunnelling. At low temperatures the distribution is similar to the one of standard Variable Range Hopping (VRH) behaviour found long ago in doped semiconductors; we point out that a result by Raikh and Ruzin does not apply. At higher temperatures the distribution is, already for wires with a few tens impurities, very close to a Gumbel distribution and this quick convergence and the shape of the finite-size corrections may be used as a signature of the breaking of a nanowire by strong impurities.
