Carbon nanotubes having
nanoscale dimension (1-D) have been well-known over the past
15 years. The molecules were first discovered by Iijima in
1991 [1] when he was studying the synthesis of
fullerenes by using electric arc discharge technique. The high resolution
transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) was employed for observation of that
phenomenon. Carbon
nanotubes that Iijima observed were so called multi-walled carbon
nanotubes (MWNTs) as shown in Fig. 1a, nested as
Russian dolls, containing at least two graphitic layers, and generally have
inner diameters of around 4 nm. Two years later, Iijima and
Ichihashi of NEC [2] and Bethune and colleagues of the IBM
Almaden Research
Center in California [3] synthesized single-walled
carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) as shown in Fig. 1b. The SWNTs were
synthesized by the same route of producing MWNTs but adding some metal
particles to the carbon electrodes. The appearance of SWNT is quite different
to that of MWNT. The individual tubes have very small diameters (typically ~
1nm), and are curled and looped rather than straight.
In the early 1990s, two research groups predicted electronic
properties of individual SWNTs [4-6]. From their calculations, they found that
SWNTs can be either metallic or semiconducting depending on their chirality and
diameter. By the end of that decade, these particular predictions were
confirmed by experiments [7-8]. In the meantime, a lot of
reviews which provide a comprehensive overview with respect to the synthesis,
characterization, applications, and the basic mechanical and electronic
properties of carbon nanotube have appeared [9–22].
In the following sections, the structure, synthesis,
properties and applications of CNTs are
discussed in details. Because of many interesting properties that
carbon nanotubes exhibit, CNTs have emerged to be one of
the most intensively investigated nanostructure materials.
(a) (b)
Figure 1: (a) HRTEM images of two MWNTs (b) and SWNTs rope: each black circle is the image of one SWNT of the rope
(Figure from Physique 4 (2003) P. 968).Reference
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3. D.S. Bethune, C.H. Kiang, M.S. De Vries, G. Gorman, R. Savoy, J. Vazquez, and R. Beyers, Cobalt-catalysed growth of carbon nanotubes with single-atomic-layer walls, Nature (London), 1993, 363, 605-607.
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22. D. Zhang, and C.L. Lin, Carbon nanotube final report, 2003.
