Abstract
Application of electric field in normal to aligned carbon nanotubes creates Coulomb forces at intertube junctions and tubes become closely packed. Packed structure facilitates intertube transfer of carriers and reduced resistance is found to scale with field strength. Aggregated nanotubes are therefore used as field sensors and sensitivity is evident by drastic fluctuations of resistance. Sensing mechanism is discussed and verified. Chapter 1 describes the background and motivation of the thesis Chapter 2 introduces the background of the carbon nanotubes, electric field sensors, and the simulation system. Chapter 3 describes experimental setups and characterization techniques. Chapter 4 discusses the sensing results of electric field by aligned carbon nanotubes and the aggregation behavior of the carbon nanotubes. Chapter 5 concludes the experimental results.