Contact Resistance to a One-Dimensional Quasi-Ballistic Nanotube/Wire

A distributed contact model is presented for a 1-D quasi-ballistic conductor deriving a contact resistance versus contact length as a hyperbolic cotangent relationship in terms of the quantum of resistance, the coupling conductance g
_c
of the contact, and the ballistic mean free path (λ
_b
). The model gave excellent fits to recent contact resistance-versus-contact length data for carbon nanotubes giving g
_c
= 2 μS/nm and λ
_b
= 380 nm.