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Materials science

Nanotubes see the light

Nature volume 447, pages 50–51 (2007)Cite this article

When it comes to having their conduction properties tweaked, carbon nanotubes are bothersome customers. One way to do it is to incorporate a photosensitive dye into the nanotubes' walls.

One of the great challenges of nanotechnology today is scaling electronic and mechanical devices down to atomic dimensions. A notably successful example has been the field-effect transistor (FET), in which a weak electric field is used to switch on and off a flow of electricity in a nearby semiconductor material. FETs are now used in their millions to, for example, amplify wireless signals. Writing in Physical Review Letters, Simmons et al.1 report a further refinement of such nanoscale devices: the incorporation of a photosensitive dye into a single-walled carbon nanotube, so that its electrical conductivity can be controlled by light.

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Figure 1: Light bending and stretching.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dirk M. Guldi is at the Institut für Physikalische Chemie I, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen–Nürnberg, Egerlandstraße 3, 91058 Erlangen, Germany. dirk.guldi@chemie.uni-erlangen.de,

    Dirk M. Guldi

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  1. Dirk M. Guldi
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Guldi, D. Nanotubes see the light. Nature 447, 50–51 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/447050a

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