Agnieszka E. Lekawa-Raus

arXiv2026

Taming quantum interference: a route to high electrical conductance in carbon nanotube assemblies

In nanostructured networks, transport is governed by junctions between neighbouring building blocks. Improving their alignment and removing defects is the intuitive route to better electron transport. At low temperatures, when transport becomes coherent, a junction cannot always be reduced to a single effective resistance, because electron-wave interference can strongly enhance or suppress transmission even in nominally ideal junctions. Using carbon nanotube (CNT) networks as a model system, we explore coherent transport through experimentally relevant junctions, from single and multiple single-walled CNT (SWCNT) contacts to double-walled CNT (DWCNT) and multi-walled CNT (MWCNT) junctions, with atomistic tight-binding non-equilibrium Green's-function calculations, also under a perpendicular magnetic field. We use analytically solvable minimal models to identify transport regimes expected for quasi-1D nanoscale junctions, and an electron-waveguide picture to interpret their CNT-specific manifestations. For single SWCNT--SWCNT junctions, high-transmission windows are set mainly by overlap length, doping and magnetic field. Gateway states can enhance conductance when some CNT subbands are gapped, and in some cases a magnetic field can restore transmission by lifting an interference blockade. In more complex architectures, added paths become selective: multi-junctions generate resonant filtering, while additional walls redistribute transmission instead of acting as independent channels. DWCNT junctions remain outer-wall dominated and SWCNT-like, whereas MWCNT junctions redistribute transmission among coupled walls and show a more complex field response. Our ultrahigh-field measurements likewise show lower, more field-sensitive conductance in MWCNT than SWCNT fibres. This work turns microscopic interference mechanisms into design principles for high-conductance, field-stable CNT conductors.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2026

Quantum Limits of Electronic Transport in Nanostructured Macroscopic Conductors

Macroscopic assemblies of one- and two-dimensional materials promise to translate nanoscale electronic properties into device-scale performance, yet the microscopic principles governing charge transport in such networks remain unresolved. In these systems, conductivity is often interpreted using phenomenological models that do not explicitly connect electronic structure to macroscopic magnetotransport. Here we develop a unified atomistic framework that links quantum-coherent transport, thermal disorder and magnetic-field effects, and combine it with ultrahigh-field magnetotransport measurements up to 60 T over a broad temperature range on carbon nanotube fibres. We show that positive magnetoresistance is controlled by junction overlap length, whereas negative magnetoresistance arises predominantly from lattice-mismatched heterojunctions rather than weak localisation alone. Statistical analysis of a large-scale numerical dataset reveals that the experimentally observed positive quadratic magnetoresistance originates from junction transport. These results show that macroscopic transport in disordered low-dimensional networks is governed primarily by junction-level quantum interference rather than solely by defects or doping.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗