Tellurium can form nanowires of helical atomic chains. With their unique one-dimensional van der Waals structure, these nanowires are expected to show physical and electronic properties that are remarkably different from those of bulk tellurium. Here, we show that few-chain and single-chain van der Waals tellurium nanowires can be isolated using carbon nanotube and boron nitride nanotube encapsulation. With this approach, the number of atomic chains can be controlled by the inner diameter of the nanotube. The Raman response of the structures suggests that the interaction between a single-atomic tellurium chain and a carbon nanotube is weak, and that the inter-chain interaction becomes stronger as the number of chains increases. Compared with bare tellurium nanowires on SiO₂, nanowires encapsulated in boron nitride nanotubes exhibit a dramatically enhanced current-carrying capacity, with a current density of 1.5 × 10⁸ A cm⁻² that exceeds that of most semiconducting nanowires. We also use our tellurium nanowires encapsulated in boron nitride nanotubes to create field-effect transistors with a diameter of only 2 nm.

碲可以形成螺旋原子链的纳米线。凭借其独特的一维范德华结构，这些纳米线有望显示出与大容量碲显着不同的物理和电子特性。在这里，我们显示了可以使用碳纳米管和氮化硼纳米管封装来分离少数链和单链范德华碲纳米线。通过这种方法，原子链的数量可以由纳米管的内径控制。这些结构的拉曼响应表明，单原子碲链与碳纳米管之间的相互作用较弱，并且随着链数的增加，链间相互作用变得更强。与SiO ₂上的裸碲纳米线相比封装在氮化硼纳米管中的纳米线表现出显着增强的载流能力，其电流密度为1.5×10 ⁸  A cm ^-2，超过了大多数半导体纳米线的电流密度。我们还使用封装在氮化硼纳米管中的碲纳米线来创建直径仅为2 nm的场效应晶体管。