H.5
Log Number: 21
Abstract Submitted to the NT-99-Logo NANOTUBE-99 Workshop:

Laser driven atomic pump

Petr Král1 and David Tománek2

1 Department of Physics, University of Toronto;
2 Department of Physics and Astronomy and Center for Fundamental Materials Research, Michigan State University
Contact e-mail: kral@physics.utoronto.ca

We propose a laser driven pump [1] for atomic transport through carbon nanotubes. The tube is excited in the coherent control scheme, where two laser beams of frequencies 2w and w generate one- and two-photon interband electron transitions, respectively. Their mixing produces a hot carrier population with anisotropy in the momentum space, yielding a net dc current in the nanotube. The current is predicted to drive intercalated atoms along the nanotube by transferring momenta and energy of hot electrons to the atom, and thus dragging it and facilitating detachment from defects. As an example, we calculate the transport of a Li atom through the armchair (10,10) carbon nanotube that is irradiated by laser pulses. The temperature dependence of the average atomic drift velocity shows a pronounced maximum, corresponding to vLi =25nm/ms. This "atomic-scale fountain pen" is a prototype of a single atom deposition machine which could overcome the loading problem of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope. The same scheme could be applied also to drive atoms across surfaces or through porous media.

[1] Petr Král and David Tománek: "Laser driven atomic pump", Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 5373 (1999).

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