Oscillatory Response of a Capped Double-Walled Carbon Nanotube

In this work, the vibrational response of an oscillator constructed out of a capped double-walled carbon nanotube (DWNT) is investigated. The inner tube exhibits a wide range of motion characteristics that are influenced by external excitation, prescribed boundary conditions and ambient temperatures of the tubes. Unlike the open-end DWNT, the capped tube possesses bistable equilibrium properties that can be harnessed for read/write operations for use as a non-volatile memory element. This can be achieved by suitably tuning the inner tube through an adjustment of its frequencies and final stop positions, in order to bring it to a terse stop at one of the stable equilibrium locations for the read/write. Further, our work showed that the energy dissipation mechanism in the capped DWNT arises from 2 sources; the tube temperatures and boundary conditions.