Coulomb-blockade transport in quasi-one dimensional polymer nanofibers

Abstract

We report the low temperature current-voltage (I-V) characteristics studies in quasi-one dimensional conducting polymer nanofibers. We find a threshold voltage Vt below which little current flows at temperatures below 30-40 K. For V > Vt current scales as (V/Vt - 1)^zeta, where zeta ~ 1.8-2.1 at high biases. Differential conductance oscillations are found whose magnitude increases as temperature decreases below 10 K. We attribute the observed low temperature I-V behavior to Coulomb blockade effects with a crossover to Luttinger liquid-like behavior at high temperature. We demonstrate that at low temperatures such a doped conjugated polymer fiber can be considered as an array of small conducting regions separated by nanoscale barriers, where the Coulomb blockade tunneling is the dominant transport mechanism.