Negative differential resistance in ZnO coated peptide nanotube.

Overview

We investigate the room temperature electronic transport properties of a zinc oxide (ZnO) coated peptide nanotube contacted with Au electrodes. Current-voltage (I-V ) characteristics show asymmetric negative differential resistance (NDR) behavior along with current rectification. The NDR phenomenon is observed in both negative and positive voltage sweep scans, and found to be dependent on the scan rate and humidity. Our results suggest that the NDR is due to protonic conduction arising from water molecule redox reaction on the surface of ZnO coated peptide nanotubes rather than the conventional resonant tunneling mechanism.