title: Placing and imaging individual carbon nanotubes on Cu(111) clean surface using in situ pulsed-jet deposition-STM technique.
abstract: We report pulsed-jet deposition of single-wall and double-wall carbon nanotubes (SWNTs and DWNTs; CNTs) onto a clean Cu(111) surface and their scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) observations under ultra-high vacuum (UHV). The clean Cu(111) surface prepared by a repeated Ar-sputtering and annealing is introduced into a load-lock chamber kept at a 10(-5)-Pa range vacuum, and the CNTs dispersed in a chloroform solution by ultrasonication are pulse-injected onto the surface. Since the substrate is annealed at 700 K to remove the residual solvent molecules, high resolution lattice images of the CNTs are successfully observed by STM. High-resolution chirality-resolved images of the two SWNTs with a metal cluster are also observed, supporting the well accepted growth mechanism of the CNTs from the metal-catalyst cluster. The present pulsed-jet deposition in high-vacuum is superior to the conventional spin-coating or drop-coating techniques for preparing clean and well-defined CNTs on clean surfaces for high-resolution and contamination-free UHV-STM observation.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Nagoya University, Nagoya 464-8602, Japan.
authors.forename: Nobuyuki
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Fukui
authors.forename: Atsushi
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Taninaka
authors.forename: Toshiki
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Sugai
authors.forename: Hiromichi
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Yoshida
authors.forename: Seiji
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Heike
authors.forename: Masaaki
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Fujimori
authors.forename: Yasuhiko
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Terada
authors.forename: Tomihiro
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Hashizume
authors.forename: Hisanori
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Shinohara