Nanotubes, the tiny honeycomb cylinders of carbon atoms only a few nanometers wide, are perhaps the signature material of modern engineering research, but actually trying to organize the atomic scale rods is notoriously like herding cats. A new study* from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Rice University, however, offers an inexpensive process that gets nanotubes to obediently line themselves up—that is, self-assemble—in neat rows, more like ducks.
A broad range of emerging electronic and materials technologies take advantage of the unique physical, optical and electrical properties of carbon nanotubes, but most of them—nanoscale conductors or “nanowires,” for instance—are predicated on the ability to efficiently line the nanotubes up in some organized arrangement.
As it turns out, there’s a bonus. Over the course of about a day, the bile acid shells cause the nanotubes to begin lining up, end to end, in long strands, and then the strands begin to join together in twisted filaments, like a length of twisted copper wire. The discovery is a long way from a perfect solution for ordering nanotubes, Hobbie cautions, and a lot of development remains to be done. For one thing, ideally, the bile acid shells would be removed after the nanotubes are in their ordered positions, but this has proven difficult. And the surfactant is toxic to living cells, which precludes most biomedical applications unless it is removed. On the other hand, he says, it already is an easy and extremely inexpensive technique for researchers interested in studying, for example, optical properties of carbon nanotubes. “It gives a recipe for how to create ordered, aligned arrangements of individual carbon nanotubes. You don’t need to use any external magnetic or electrical fields, and you don’t need to dry the tubes out in a polymer and heat it up and stretch it. You can get fairly significant regions of very nice alignment just spontaneously through this self assembly.” ###
(For more on the purifying of carbon nanotubes, see “Spin Control: New Technique Sorts Nanotubes by Length,” Tech Beat, May 13,2008: nist.gov/public_affairs/techbeat/nanotubes )
* E.K. Hobbie, J.A. Fagan, M.L. Becker, S.D. Hudson, N. Fakhri and M. Pasquali. Self-assembly of ordered nanowires in biological suspensions of single-wall carbon nanotubes. ACS Nano, published online Dec. 16, 2008.
** Sodium deoxycholate.
Contact: Michael Baum michael.baum@nist.gov 301-975-2763 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
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