Issue 23, 2017

Chirality-dependent growth of single-wall carbon nanotubes as revealed inside nano-test tubes

Abstract

Growth dynamics of single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) have been studied with nickelocene as a precursor encapsulated in the interior of template SWCNTs. By means of multi-laser Raman spectroscopy, growth curves of nine different SWCNTs, (8,8), (12,3), (13,1), (9,6), (10,4), (11,2), (11,1), (9,3) and (9,2), have been determined upon in situ annealing at various temperatures. The data reveal that the nanotubes grow through fast and slow reaction pathways with high and low activation energies, respectively. While the activation energy of the slow growth is independent of the nanotube's chiral vector, that of the fast growth exhibits a monotonic increase as the tube diameter reduces from ∼1.1 down to 0.8 nm and no dependency on the chiral angle, which can be attributed to the size-dependent properties of catalyst clusters. The chirality dependent catalytic growth properties exploited in this study provide the basis for a large-scale synthesis of single-chiral vector SWCNTs.

Graphical abstract: Chirality-dependent growth of single-wall carbon nanotubes as revealed inside nano-test tubes

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
15 Mar 2017
Accepted
05 May 2017
First published
08 May 2017
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

Nanoscale, 2017,9, 7998-8006

Chirality-dependent growth of single-wall carbon nanotubes as revealed inside nano-test tubes

M. V. Kharlamova, C. Kramberger, T. Saito, Y. Sato, K. Suenaga, T. Pichler and H. Shiozawa, Nanoscale, 2017, 9, 7998 DOI: 10.1039/C7NR01846K

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