Temperature-mediated growth of single-walled carbon-nanotube intramolecular junctions

Abstract

Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) possess superior electronic and physical properties that make them ideal candidates for making next-generation electronic circuits that break the size limitation of current silicon-based technology. The first critical step in making a full SWNT electronic circuit is to make SWNT intramolecular junctions in a controlled manner. Although SWNT intramolecular junctions have been grown by several methods, they only grew inadvertently in most cases. Here, we report well-controlled temperature-mediated growth of intramolecular junctions in SWNTs. Specifically, by changing the temperature during growth, we found that SWNTs systematically form intramolecular junctions. This was achieved by a consistent variation in the SWNT diameter and chirality with changing growth temperature even though the catalyst particles remained the same. These findings provide a potential approach for growing SWNT intramolecular junctions at desired locations, sizes and orientations, which are important for making SWNT electronic circuits.

Friedel Oscillations in Carbon Nanotube Quantum Dots and Superlattices

“…Therefore, the electronic structure of single junctions [3], quantum dots [4,5] and superlattices [6,7] has been the subject of many theoretical investigations. Recently, the controlled growth of carbon nanotube intramolecular junctions by temperature variations has been reported [8]. This breakthrough may open the possibility of fabricating complex nanotube devices, which have to be fully characterized.…”

Sculpting carbon bonds for allotropic transformation through solid-state re-engineering of –sp2 carbon

“…However, these rearrangement studies were carried out only for local changes of junctions in a few individual nanotubes [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]25 and by the destruction of carbon layers on electrical breakdown 23,26,27 . Furthermore, the reported reconstruction methods require high to extremely high temperature (750-2,200°C) conditions 20,22,28 , making them power-intensive, and incompatible with various scalable processes. Therefore, developing a fast and scalable method for reproducibly creating particular types of covalently bonded C-C junctions and sp 2 molecular structures in nanocarbon networks that result in repeatable physical properties is still a fundamental challenge.…”

Electronic band structure of carbon nanotube superlattices from first-principles calculations

“…From the practical viewpoint, most simple nanotube devices 2,4 have been found accidentally, but these pioneering works have stimulated research on their systematic production. In fact, quite recently, the controlled production of several carbon nanotube intramolecular junctions by temperature changes during growth 17 has been reported. This finding may allow for the production of carbon nanotube quantum dots and superlattices in a controllable fashion, providing single-wall carbon nanotube nanoelectronic components.…”