Asymmetric Carbon Nanotube Dimers for Novel Sensing Applications

In this work, we study the use of asymmetric carbon nanotube (CNT) dimers for the contactless detection of foreign nano-particles. Asymmetric CNT dimers create a unique field distribution, through the electromagnetic coupling, which in turn generates two distinct resonances representing the bonding and anti-bonding modes. The presence of a foreign nano-particle (NP) in the vicinity of the CNT dimer perturbs the dimer's field distribution and causes the bonding and anti-bonding resonances to shift by unequal amounts depending on the NP location. By studying the difference in the shift of the bonding and the anti-bonding resonances, we show that the NP relative location can be reconstructed. The computational experiments performed in this work show how asymmetric CNT dimers can be used for novel sensing applications.