Abstract
Chromatic materials such as polydiacetylene change colour in response to a wide variety of environmental stimuli, including changes in temperature, pH and chemical or mechanical stress, and have been extensively explored as sensing devices1,2,3,4. Here, we report the facile synthesis of carbon nanotube/polydiacetylene nanocomposite fibres that rapidly and reversibly respond to electrical current, with the resulting colour change being readily observable with the naked eye. These composite fibres also chromatically respond to a broad spectrum of other stimulations. For example, they exhibit rapid and reversible stress-induced chromatism with negligible elongation. These electrochromatic nanocomposite fibres could have various applications in sensing.
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Change history
27 September 2009
In the version of this Letter initially published online, Fig. 1a should have been described as a transmission electron microscopy image. This error has been corrected in all versions.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Shanghai Pujiang Program (09PJ1401100) and start-up fund at Fudan University, and partly supported by the US Department of Energy (Los Alamos National Laboratory Directed Research and Development Project). The authors thank M. Jain, J.O. Willis and D.E. Peterson for help with the conductivity measurements and for their critical reading of the manuscript.
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Q.L. contributed materials. X.S., F.C., Y.Z., G.L. and H.P. carried out experiments. X.C., D.C., Y.L., Y.Z. and Q.J. contributed to preparation of the manuscript. H.P. directed the research, analysed the data and wrote the manuscript.
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Peng, H., Sun, X., Cai, F. et al. Electrochromatic carbon nanotube/polydiacetylene nanocomposite fibres. Nature Nanotech 4, 738–741 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2009.264
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2009.264
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