Electronic charge transport through ZnO nanoribbons

I–V characteristics of ZnO nanoribbons (NRs) have been investigated using density functional theory coupled to non-equilibrium Green’s Function. The current through the NRs drops with the increasing NR width, leveling off to 1.66 and 0.42 µA in zig-zag and arm-chair NRs respectively for widths ~20 Å at 3 V of electrical bias. The transconductance as well as the current flowing through the arm-chair NRs decays exponentially with NR width for both odd and even number of dimer lines traversed. The current through the zig-zag NRs falls off exponentially with NR width, being insensitive to the odd or even numbers of zig-zag lines appearing along the normal to the charge transport direction.