Nanotech on a roll

A carbon nanotube cap is simulated on a computer.

Cutting-edge research by IRL Industry and Outreach Fellow Professor Shaun Hendy and post-doctoral fellow Dr Dmitri Schebarchov and colleagues at MIT in the United States could help solve one of the greatest mysteries of nanotechnology.

In a research paper accepted for publication in one of the world’s most prestigious academic journals, Physical Review Letters, Hendy and Schebarchov develop and test a model of carbon nanotube (CNT) production that suggests a way to overcome persistent manufacturing hurdles preventing CNTs' wider uptake by industry.

“The discovery and characterisation of CNTs in the early 1990s sparked a revolution in nanoscale science and technology that continues today,” Professor Hendy says.

“However, despite a dizzying array of proposed and potential applications, examples of CNT-based products are rare in today’s marketplace.”

That is because their special electrical properties depend upon the way the carbon is rolled up into a tube – that is, their ‘chirality’ – something current manufacturing methods cannot control.

“While some progress has been made on techniques that allow separation by CNT chirality, these methods remain slow and small-scale in nature,” he says.

The research suggests that it might in fact be possible to control the structure of CNTs by tuning the composition of the catalyst particle that is used to grow them.

“By showing how a key step in the growth of a nanotube depends on its structure (and hence its chirality) and the structure of the catalyst particle, our work suggests that it might be possible to design catalyst particles that will only nucleate tubes of a specific chirality.”