title: Deformation-driven electrical transport of individual boron nitride nanotubes.
abstract: In contrast to standard metallic or semiconducting graphitic carbon nanotubes, for years their structural analogs, boron nitride nanotubes, in which alternating boron and nitrogen atoms substitute for carbon atoms in a graphitic network, have been considered to be truly electrically insulating due to a wide band gap of layered BN. Alternatively, here, we show that under in situ elastic bending deformation at room temperature inside a 300 kV high-resolution transmission electron microscope, a normally electrically insulating multiwalled BN nanotube may surprisingly transform to a semiconductor. The semiconducting parameters of bent multiwalled BN nanotubes squeezed between two approaching gold contacts inside the pole piece of the microscope have been retrieved based on the experimentally recorded I-V curves. In addition, the first experimental signs suggestive of piezoelectric behavior in deformed BN nanotubes have been observed.
authors.affiliation: International Center for Young Scientists, and Nanoscale Materials Center, National Institute for Materials Science, Namiki 1-1, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0044, Japan.
authors.forename: Xuedong
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Bai
authors.forename: Dmitri
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Golberg
authors.forename: Yoshio
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Bando
authors.forename: Chunyi
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Zhi
authors.forename: Chengchun
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Tang
authors.forename: Masanori
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Mitome
authors.forename: Keiji
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kurashima