Selective Excitations of Transverse Vibrational Modes of a Carbon Nanotube through a “Shuttle-Like” Electromechanical Instability

Abstract EN

We study the dynamics of transverse oscillations of a suspended carbon nanotube into which electron current is injected from the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM).

In this case the correlations between the displacement of the nanotube and its charge state, determined by the position-dependent electron tunneling rate, can lead to a “shuttle-like” instability for the transverse vibrational modes.

We find that selective excitation of a specific mode can be achieved by an accurate positioning of the STM tip.

This result suggests a feasible way to control the dynamics of this nano-electromechanical system (NEMS) based on the “shuttle instability.”