Molecular Evolutionary Growth of Ultralong Semiconducting Double-Walled Carbon Nanotubes.

Abstract

The self-assembling preparation accompanied with template auto-catalysis loop and the ability to gather energy, induces the appearance of chirality and entropy reduction in biotic systems. However, an abiotic system with biotic characteristics is of great significance but still missing. Here, it is demonstrated that the molecular evolution is characteristic of ultralong carbon nanotube preparation, revealing the advantage of chiral assembly through template auto-catalysis growth, stepwise-enriched chirality distribution with decreasing entropy, and environmental effects on the evolutionary growth. Specifically, the defective and metallic nanotubes perform inferiority to semiconducting counterparts, among of which the ones with double walls and specific chirality (n, m) are more predominant due to molecular coevolution. An explicit evolutionary trend for tailoring certain layer chirality is presented toward perfect near-(2n, n)-containing semiconducting double-walled nanotubes. These findings extend our conceptual understanding for the template auto-catalysis assembly of abiotic carbon nanotubes, and provide an inspiration for preparing chiral materials with kinetic stability by evolutionary growth.