Critical plasma-processing-enabled growth of chirality-predefined single-walled carbon nanotubes from carbon nanorings

Abstract

The chirality-controlled growth of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) has been an ultimate challenge since their discovery. We report a proof-of-principle plasma processing on the chirality-predefined growth of SWNTs originating from single-hoop molecules of carbon six-membered rings (carbon nanorings: CNRs), which can be viewed as simple units of ( n , n ) metallic SWNTs ( n : the number of benzene rings). Plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition enables us to find the correlation between the diameter of CNRs and that of SWNTs over n = 6–12, while only the specified CNRs ( n = 10, 12) correspondingly grow up to near (10,10) and (12,12) metallic SWNTs at critical low-temperature of 350 °C.

Keywords

• plasma processing
• chirality predefined
• single-walled carbon nanotubes
• carbon nanorings