Interrelation of Elasticity and Thermal Bath in Nanotube Cantilevers

We report the first study on the thermal behavior of the stiffness of individual carbon nanotubes, which is achieved by measuring the resonance frequency of their fundamental mechanical bending modes. We observe a reduction of the Young's modulus over a large temperature range with a slope -(173±65)  ppm/K in its relative shift. These findings are reproduced by two different theoretical models based on the thermal dynamics of the lattice. These results reveal how the measured fundamental bending modes depend on the phonons in the nanotube via the Young's modulus. An alternative description based on the coupling between the measured mechanical modes and the phonon thermal bath in the Akhiezer limit is discussed.