Non-contact conductance measurement of nanosize objects using reasonant cavity

A cavity perturbation method is used to determine conductance of small volume nano-carbon materials. These are the building blocks of nanostructured materials and devices, and therefore their electrical characteristics are important in the materials development and production. Non-contact measurement is performed in WR-90 waveguide configuration in the X-band frequency band from 6 GHz to 12 GHz. The presented semi-empirical perturbation model correlates the experimental quality factor and the specimen volume with the specimen imaginary part of permittivity and conductance. The measurement is illustrated on conducting carbon nanotube films having volumes in the range of 10^-5 cm³ and conductivity of 50 S/cm.