Carbon nanotube
Allotropes of carbon with a cylindrical nanostructure / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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A carbon nanotube (CNT) is a tube made of carbon with a diameter in the nanometre range (nanoscale). They are one of the allotropes of carbon.
Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) have diameters around 0.5–2.0 nanometres, about 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. They can be idealised as cutouts from a two-dimensional graphene sheet rolled up to form a hollow cylinder.[1]
Multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) consist of nested single-wall carbon nanotubes[1] in a nested, tube-in-tube structure.[2] Double- and triple-walled carbon nanotubes are special cases of MWCNT.
Carbon nanotubes can exhibit remarkable properties, such as exceptional tensile strength[3] and thermal conductivity[4][5][6] because of their nanostructure and strength of the bonds between carbon atoms. Some SWCNT structures exhibit high electrical conductivity[7][8] while others are semiconductors.[9][10] In addition, carbon nanotubes can be chemically modified.[11] These properties are expected to be valuable in many areas of technology, such as electronics, optics, composite materials (replacing or complementing carbon fibres), nanotechnology (including nanomedicine[12]), and other applications of materials science.
The predicted properties for SWCNTs were tantalising, but a path to synthesising them was lacking until 1993, when Iijima and Ichihashi at NEC, and Bethune and others at IBM independently discovered that co-vaporising carbon and transition metals such as iron and cobalt could specifically catalyse SWCNT formation.[13][14] These discoveries triggered research that succeeded in greatly increasing the efficiency of the catalytic production technique,[15] and led to an explosion of work to characterise and find applications for SWCNTs.