What is Carbon Nanotubes ? and How Will Change the World ?

What is the Carbon Nanotubes ?

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are tubes made of carbon with diameters typically measured in nanometers.

Carbon nanotubes often refer to single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) with diameters in the range of a nanometer. Single-wall carbon nanotubes are one of the allotropes of carbon, intermediate between fullerene cages and flat graphene.

Although not made this way, single-wall carbon nanotubes can be idealized as cutouts from a two-dimensional hexagonal lattice of carbon atoms rolled up along one of the Bravais lattice vectors of the hexagonal lattice to form a hollow cylinder. In this construction, periodic boundary conditions are imposed over the length of this roll-up vector to yield a helical lattice of seamlessly bonded carbon atoms on the cylinder surface.

Carbon nanotubes also often refer to multi-wall carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) consisting of nested single-wall carbon nanotubes[1] weakly bound together by van der Waals interactions in a tree ring-like structure. If not identical, these tubes are very similar to Oberlin, Endo, and Koyama’s long straight and parallel carbon layers cylindrically arranged around a hollow tube. Multi-wall carbon nanotubes are also sometimes used to refer to double- and triple-wall carbon nanotubes.

Carbon nanotubes can also refer to tubes with an undetermined carbon-wall structure and diameters less than 100 nanometers. Such tubes were discovered in 1952 by Radushkevich and Lukyanovich.

While nanotubes of other compositions exist, most research has been focused on the carbon ones. Therefore, the “carbon” qualifier is often left implicit in the acronyms, and the names are abbreviated NT, SWNT, and MWNT.

The length of a carbon nanotube produced by common production methods is often not reported, but is typically much larger than its diameter. Thus, for many purposes, end effects are neglected and the length of carbon nanotubes is assumed infinite.

Carbon nanotubes can exhibit remarkable electrical conductivity, while others are semiconductors. They also have exceptional tensile strength and thermal conductivity because of their nanostructure and strength of the bonds between carbon atoms. In addition, they 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 fibers), nanotechnology, and other applications of materials science.

Rolling up a hexagonal lattice along different directions to form different infinitely long single-wall carbon nanotubes shows that all of these tubes not only have helical but also translational symmetry along the tube axis and many also have nontrivial rotational symmetry about this axis. In addition, most are chiral, meaning the tube and its mirror image cannot be superimposed. This construction also allows single-wall carbon nanotubes to be labeled by a pair of integers.

A special group of achiral single-wall carbon nanotubes are metallic, but all the rest are either small or moderate band gap semiconductors. These electrical properties, however, do not depend on whether the hexagonal lattice is rolled from its back to front or from its front to back and hence are the same for the tube and its mirror image.

How Will Change the World ?

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