Visible light diffraction studies on periodically aligned arrays of carbon nanotubes: Experimental and theoretical comparison

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

We have investigated visible light diffraction on honeycomb arrays of aligned carbon nanotubes grown on nickel nanoparticles prepared using the nanosphere lithography. A monolayer of 980nm polystyrene spheres was used as the mask for the deposition of nickel nanoparticles from which carbon nanotubes of 100nm in diameter and up to a couple of microns in length were grown. We show that a standard theory of diffraction from point scatterers explains all the observed diffraction features including Bragg’s law and the strong enhancement of the second and fifth order diffraction spots.