Carbon nanotube

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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. Two broad classes of carbon nanotubes are recognized:

• 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.
• Multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) consist of nested single-wall carbon nanotubes in a nested, tube-in-tube structure. Double- and triple-walled carbon nanotubes are special cases of MWCNT.

Carbon nanotubes can exhibit remarkable properties, such as exceptional tensile strength and thermal conductivity because of their nanostructure and strength of the bonds between carbon atoms. Some SWCNT structures exhibit high electrical conductivity while others are semiconductors. In addition, carbon nanotubes can be chemically modified. 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), 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. These discoveries triggered research that succeeded in greatly increasing the efficiency of the catalytic production technique, and led to an explosion of work to characterise and find applications for SWCNTs.