Recent efforts have produced significant advances in the construction of one-dimensional nanomaterials as a result of their novel size-dependent properties. Nanotubes show unusual properties (electronic, optical, mechanical or catalytic) with no known analogy in nature 1,2. Over the past decade, nanotubes from carbon, metals, inorganic semiconductors, conducting polymers, etc., have been investigated using various methods 3,4. Among the strategies for the fabrication of nanotubes, template techniques have been demonstrated to be very effective 5. The ready availability of C_(60) fullerene as novel electro-pool pi-systems has made exploration of their outstanding physical and chemical properties easier. Particularly, the preparation of fullerene nanotubes is of great interest from both a fundamental and a practical point of view. Our group has synthesized nanotubes from C_(60) fullerene by repeatedly immersing an alumina template into a C_(60) toluene solution 6. However, this method needs more than ten "dip-and-dry" cycles and the filling density is rather low due to the poor solubility of C_(60). A new concept is to start from a fullerene derivative with excellent solubility and which can be easily decomposed and prepare fullerene derived nanotubes by a template technique at room temperature. The fullerene nanotubes can then be formed at higher temperature by pyrogenic decomposition.
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