  We present a scaling analysis of electronic and transport properties of
metal-semiconducting carbon nanotube interfaces as a function of the nanotube
length within the coherent transport regime, which takes fully into account
atomic-scale electronic structure and three-dimensional electrostatics of the
metal-nanotube interface using a real-space Green's function based
self-consistent tight-binding theory. As the first example, we examine devices
formed by attaching finite-size single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWNT) to both
high- and low- work function metallic electrodes through the dangling bonds at
the end. We analyze the nature of Schottky barrier formation at the
metal-nanotube interface by examining the electrostatics, the band lineup and
the conductance of the metal-SWNT molecule-metal junction as a function of the
SWNT molecule length and metal-SWNT coupling strength. We show that the
confined cylindrical geometry and the atomistic nature of electronic processes
across the metal-SWNT interface leads to a different physical picture of band
alignment from that of the planar metal-semiconductor interface. We analyze the
temperature and length dependence of the conductance of the SWNT junctions,
which shows a transition from tunneling- to thermal activation-dominated
transport with increasing nanotube length. The temperature dependence of the
conductance is much weaker than that of the planar metal-semiconductor
interface due to the finite number of conduction channels within the SWNT
junctions. We find that the current-voltage characteristics of the metal-SWNT
molecule-metal junctions are sensitive to models of the potential response to
the applied source/drain bias voltages.
