Narrow-diameter Distributed Single-walled Carbon Nanotubes Grown from Carbon Nanorings

摘要

Since electronic features of single-walled carbon nanotubes(SWCNTs)strongly depend on the diameter and side wall structure(so-called chirality),the chirality control approach is very important for the promising applications.Although a few physical and chemical approaches have been proposed to obtain single chirality from as-grown materials,it is still difficult to control the electronic feature separation.A new concept without surfactants and metallic catalysts is to directly be synthesized by using carbon nanorings such as cycloparaphenylenes(CPPs)which are the fundamental unit of armchair type SWCNTs with a metallic feature.However,there is still mismatching between inner diameters of SWCNT and CPP during the SWCNT growth process.Herein,we propose a new route to synthesize SWCNTs with a defined chirality,using orientated fullerene catalysts encapsulated inside the cavity of CPPs.