Abstract
We investigate the room temperature electronic transport properties of a zinc oxide (ZnO) coated peptide nanotube contacted with Au electrodes. Current-voltage (I-V) characteristics show asymmetric negative differential resistance (NDR) behavior along with current rectification. The NDR phenomenon is observed in both negative and positive voltage sweep scans, and found to be dependent on the scan rate and humidity. Our results suggest that the NDR is due to protonic conduction arising from water molecule redox reaction on the surface of ZnO coated peptide nanotubes rather than the conventional resonant tunneling mechanism.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 305-310 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| Journal | Applied Physics A: Materials Science and Processing |
| Volume | 112 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Aug 2013 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work for the part of electronic fabrication and electric measurement were supported by the US National Science Foundation under grant ECCS 0823902 (HM) and 0823973 (SIK). The material synthesis and the structural analysis were supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering under Award No. DEFG-02-01ER45935 (HM). The Hunter College infrastructure is supported by the National Institutes of Health, the RCMI program (G12-RR003037-245476).