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Carbon nanotubes

Captured on camera

Nature Nanotechnology volume 8, pages 894–895 (2013)Cite this article

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Images of individual carbon nanotubes with their respective optical spectra for chirality characterization are acquired directly on devices and growth substrates using a reflective polarized light microscopy set-up.

Single-walled carbon nanotubes can extend up to millimetres in length and rival the best bulk materials in terms of electric current transport properties; yet, they are only about a nanometre-wide giving rise to quantum confinement effects. This peculiar dual nature makes nanotubes promising materials for a variety of nanoscale technologies such as molecular-scale transistors, light-emitting diodes and charge-carrier multiplication devices in solar cells1. Indeed, the physics behind these emerging nanotube technologies has already been characterized at the single-device level. However, attempts to scale up devices to the wafer scale have failed, largely because the devices almost always contain a mixture of carbon nanotubes with radically different electronic properties. To overcome this hurdle, either a method to reproducibly grow nearly identical carbon nanotubes, or a high-throughput technique that can rapidly characterize single nanotubes in situ is required. Writing in Nature Nanotechnology, Feng Wang and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley have tackled the latter, and describe a spectroscopic and imaging technique that can determine the chirality of single tubes and image them at video rates on a wide variety of nanotube substrates2.

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Figure 1: Characterizing individual carbon nanotubes on substrates using polarized light microscopy.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Matt W. Graham is at the Department of Physics of Oregon State University, 301 Weniger Hall, Corvallis, Oregon 97331, USA,

    Matt W. Graham

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  1. Matt W. Graham
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Correspondence to Matt W. Graham.

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Graham, M. Captured on camera. Nature Nanotech 8, 894–895 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2013.252

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