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

Author(s)
Marianna V. Kharlamova, Christian Kramberger, Takeshi Saito, Yuta Sato, Kazu Suenaga, Thomas Pichler, Hidetsugu Shiozawa
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.

Organisation(s)
Electronic Properties of Materials, Physics of Nanostructured Materials
External organisation(s)
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)
Journal
Nanoscale
Volume
9
Pages
7998-8006
No. of pages
9
ISSN
2040-3364
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1039/c7nr01846k
Publication date
06-2017
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
103020 Surface physics, 103018 Materials physics, 210006 Nanotechnology, 103009 Solid state physics
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
General Materials Science
Portal url
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/4e733161-c8c2-4a37-a252-606d66c38397