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Surface-dominated conductance scaling in Weyl semimetal NbAs
- Source :
- npj Computational Materials, Vol 10, Iss 1, Pp 1-9 (2024)
- Publication Year :
- 2024
- Publisher :
- Nature Portfolio, 2024.
-
Abstract
- Abstract Protected surface states arising from non-trivial bandstructure topology in semimetals can potentially enable advanced device functionalities in compute, memory, interconnect, sensing, and communication. This necessitates a fundamental understanding of surface-state transport in nanoscale topological semimetals. Here, we investigate quantum transport in a prototypical topological semimetal NbAs to evaluate the potential of this class of materials for beyond-Cu interconnects in highly-scaled integrated circuits. Using density functional theory (DFT) coupled with non-equilibrium Green’s function (NEGF) calculations, we show that the resistance-area R A product in NbAs films decreases with decreasing thickness at the nanometer scale, in contrast to a nearly constant R A product in ideal Cu films. This anomalous scaling originates from the disproportionately large number of surface conduction states which dominate the ballistic conductance by up to 70% in NbAs thin films. We also show that this favorable R A scaling persists even in the presence of surface defects, in contrast to R A sharply increasing with reducing thickness for films of conventional metals, such as Cu, in the presence of surface defects. These results underscore the potential of topological semimetals as future back-end-of-line (BEOL) interconnect metals.
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 20573960
- Volume :
- 10
- Issue :
- 1
- Database :
- Directory of Open Access Journals
- Journal :
- npj Computational Materials
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- edsdoj.4970af80b57541e985606125b6df9540
- Document Type :
- article
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41524-024-01263-0