Nitrogen-doped zinc oxide nanoribbons for potential resonant tunneling diode applications

Armchair ZnONRs doped with nitrogen are investigated in the current manuscript for possible applications based on negative differential resistance (NDR). To conduct the theoretical research, we use density functional theory (DFT) in conjunction with the non-equilibrium Green's function (NEGF) formalism to carry out first principles computations. Pristine ZnONR (P-ZnONRs) is a semiconductor with a wide energy bandgap (E_g) of 2.53 eV. However, one edge N-doped ZnONRs (S_N-ZnO) and both edge N-doped ZnONRs (D_N-ZnO) are metallic. Partial density of states (PDOS) reveals that the metallicity is caused by the doped nitrogen atom. The transport characteristics analysis revealed the negative differential resistance (NDR) characteristics in the N-doped ZnONRs. The peak-to-valley current ratios (PVCR) are computed and measured to be 4.58 × 10²¹ and 1.83 × 10²² for S_N-ZnO and D_N-ZnO, respectively. The obtained findings suggest the significant potential of armchair ZnONRs for NDR-based applications such as switches, rectifiers, oscillators, memory devices, etc.