Chiral-Selective Growth of Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes on Lattice-Mismatched Epitaxial Cobalt Nanoparticles

Controlling chirality in growth of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) is important for exploiting their practical applications. For long it has been conceptually conceived that the structural control of SWNTs is potentially achievable by fabricating nanoparticle catalysts with proper structures...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inScientific reports Vol. 3; no. 1; p. 1460
Main Authors He, Maoshuai, Jiang, Hua, Liu, Bilu, Fedotov, Pavel V., Chernov, Alexander I., Obraztsova, Elena D., Cavalca, Filippo, Wagner, Jakob B., Hansen, Thomas W., Anoshkin, Ilya V., Obraztsova, Ekaterina A., Belkin, Alexey V., Sairanen, Emma, Nasibulin, Albert G., Lehtonen, Juha, Kauppinen, Esko I.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London Nature Publishing Group UK 15.03.2013
Nature Publishing Group
Subjects
639/301/357/73
639/638/549/884
639/925/357/354
639/925/357/995
Catalysis
Catalysts
Chirality
Cobalt
Cobalt - chemistry
Crystal structure
Crystallography, X-Ray
Humanities and Social Sciences
Kinetics
Metal Nanoparticles - chemistry
Metal Nanoparticles - ultrastructure
Microscopy, Electron, Scanning
Microscopy, Electron, Transmission
multidisciplinary
Nanoparticles
Nanotubes
Nanotubes, Carbon - chemistry
Science
Temperature effects
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Summary:Controlling chirality in growth of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) is important for exploiting their practical applications. For long it has been conceptually conceived that the structural control of SWNTs is potentially achievable by fabricating nanoparticle catalysts with proper structures on crystalline substrates via epitaxial growth techniques. Here, we have accomplished epitaxial formation of monometallic Co nanoparticles with well-defined crystal structure and its use as a catalyst in the selective growth of SWNTs. Dynamics of Co nanoparticles formation and SWNT growth inside an atomic-resolution environmental transmission electron microscope at a low CO pressure was recorded. We achieved highly preferential growth of semiconducting SWNTs (~90%) with an exceptionally large population of (6, 5) tubes (53%) in an ambient CO atmosphere. Particularly, we also demonstrated high enrichment in (7, 6) and (9, 4) at a low growth temperature. These findings open new perspectives both for structural control of SWNTs and for elucidating the growth mechanisms.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/srep01460