NRIs make tiniest transistor with carbon nanotubes

Two non-resident Indian scientists have created history by making the world's tiniest transistor entirely from carbon nanotubes.

Nanotubes are rolled up sheets of carbon atoms and are more than a thousand times thinner than human hair.

The discovery heralds a new era of ultra miniature electronics where standard silicon transistors are replaced with much smaller versions fashioned from carbon nanotubes.

The new transistor is a Y-shaped nanotube with two branches that meet a central stem at a junction.

Current flowing from one branch to another can be switched on and off by applying a voltage to the third. Such binary logic called "gating" is the basis of nearly all transistors.

"The small size and dramatic switching behaviour of these Y-shaped nanotubes makes them candidates for a new class of all-carbon transistor," says Prabhakar Bandaru, a materials scientist at the University of California, San Diego who led the team that included his colleagues Sungho Jin, graduate student Chiara Daraio and physicist Apparao M Rao at Clemson University in South Carolina.

Their work published in the September issue of Nature Materials has won instant acclaim from international science community.