Electrical conductivity studies on individual conjugated polymer nanowires: two-probe and four-probe results

Two- and four-probe electrical measurements on individual conjugated polymer nanowires with different diameters ranging from 20 to 190 nm have been performed to study their conductivity and nanocontact resistance. The two-probe results reveal that all the measured polymer nanowires with different diameters are semiconducting. However, the four-probe results show that the measured polymer nanowires with diameters of 190, 95-100, 35-40 and 20-25 nm are lying in the insulating, critical, metallic and insulting regimes of metal-insulator transition, respectively. The 35-40 nm nanowire displays a metal-insulator transition at around 35 K. In addition, it was found that the nanocontact resistance is in the magnitude of 104Ω at room temperature, which is comparable to the intrinsic resistance of the nanowires. These results demonstrate that four-probe electrical measurement is necessary to explore the intrinsic electronic transport properties of isolated nanowires, especially in the case of metallic nanowires, because the metallic nature of the measured nanowires may be coved by the nanocontact resistance that cannot be excluded by a two-probe technique.