Tag Archives: Liang Chen

Clone your carbon nanotubes

The Nov. 14, 2012 news release on EurekAlert highlights some work on a former nanomaterial superstar, carbon nanotubes,

Scientists and industry experts have long speculated that carbon nanotube transistors would one day replace their silicon predecessors. In 1998, Delft University built the world’s first carbon nanotube transistors – carbon nanotubes have the potential to be far smaller, faster, and consume less power than silicon transistors.

A key reason carbon nanotubes are not in your computer right now is that they are difficult to manufacture in a predictable way. Scientists have had a difficult time controlling the manufacture of nanotubes to the correct diameter, type and ultimately chirality, factors that control nanotubes’ electrical and mechanical properties.

Carbon nanotubes are typically grown using a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) system in which a chemical-laced gas is pumped into a chamber containing substrates with metal catalyst nanoparticles, upon which the nanotubes grow. It is generally believed that the diameters of the nanotubes are determined by the size of the catalytic metal nanoparticles. However, attempts to control the catalysts in hopes of achieving chirality-controlled nanotube growth have not been successful.

The USC [University of Southern California] team’s innovation was to jettison the catalyst and instead plant pieces of carbon nanotubes that have been separated and pre-selected based on chirality, using a nanotube separation technique developed and perfected by Zheng [Ming Zheng] and his coworkers at NIST [US National Institute of Standards and Technology]. Using those pieces as seeds, the team used chemical vapor deposition to extend the seeds to get much longer nanotubes, which were shown to have the same chirality as the seeds..

The process is referred to as “nanotube cloning.” The next steps in the research will be to carefully study the mechanism of the nanotube growth in this system, to scale up the cloning process to get large quantities of chirality-controlled nanotubes, and to use those nanotubes for electronic applications

H/T to ScienceDaily’s Nov. 14, 2012 news item for the full journal reference,

Jia Liu, Chuan Wang, Xiaomin Tu, Bilu Liu, Liang Chen, Ming Zheng, Chongwu Zhou. Chirality-controlled synthesis of single-wall carbon nanotubes using vapour-phase epitaxy. Nat. Commun., 13 Nov, 2012 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2205

The article is behind a paywall.