"Super Growth" - highly efficient synthesis of impurity-free single-walled carbon nanotubes and its application

Abstract

In this paper, we demonstrate an extremely efficient chemical vapour deposition synthesis of single-walled carbon nanotubes where the activity and lifetime of the catalysts are enhanced by an addition of water into the ambient of the CVD furnace, a growth mode we call growth. The enhanced catalytic activity of super growth results in massive growth of super-dense and vertically-aligned single-walled nanotubes forests with heights up to 2.5 millimeters. In addition, these SWNT forests were easily separated from the catalysts, producing the most pure SWNT material (over 99.98%) ever made, amazingly through an all-dry process without any purification. Moreover, patterned highly organized intrinsic single-walled nanotube structures were successfully fabricated. Super growth simultaneously addresses many critical problems such as scalability, purity, and cost, and opens up innumerable opportunities ranging from fundamental research to real applications.