title: Chemical vapor deposition synthesis of near-zigzag single-walled carbon nanotubes with stable tube-catalyst interface.
abstract: Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) growth is regarded as the most promising method for realizing structure-specific single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNT) growth. In the past 20 years, many efforts dedicated to chirality-selective SWNT growth using various strategies have been reported. However, normal CVD growth under constant conditions could not fully optimize the chirality because the randomly formed cap structure allows the nucleation of all types of SWNTs and the chirality of an SWNT is unlikely to be changed during the following elongation process. We report a new CVD process that allows temperature to be periodically changed to vary SWNT chirality multiple times during elongation to build up the energetically preferred SWNT-catalyst interface. With this strategy, SWNTs with small helix angles (less than 10°), which are predicted to have lower interfacial formation energy than others, are enriched up to ~72%. Kinetic analysis of the process suggests a multiple redistribution feature whereby a large chiral angle SWNT tends to reach the near-zigzag chirality step by step with a small chiral angle change at each step, and hence, we named this method "tandem plate CVD." This method opens a door to synthesizing chirality-selective SWNTs by rational catalyst design.
authors.affiliation: Center for Nanochemistry, Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, State Key Laboratory for Structural Chemistry of Unstable and Stable Species, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
authors.forename: Qiuchen
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.affiliation: Institute of Textiles and Clothing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region 999077, China.; School of Materials Science & Engineering, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang 212013, China.
authors.forename: Ziwei
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-4525-9417
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: Center for Nanochemistry, Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, State Key Laboratory for Structural Chemistry of Unstable and Stable Species, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
authors.forename: Yue
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.affiliation: Institute of Textiles and Clothing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region 999077, China.
authors.forename: Feng
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Ding
authors.affiliation: Center for Nanochemistry, Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, State Key Laboratory for Structural Chemistry of Unstable and Stable Species, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
authors.forename: Jin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhang
mesh_terms: D002384:Catalysis; D015233:Models, Statistical; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D036103:Nanotechnology; D037742:Nanotubes, Carbon / Q000737:chemistry*; D013816:Thermodynamics
chemical_list: D037742:Nanotubes, Carbon
keywords: Zigzag single-walled carbon nanotubes; thermodynamics preference; tube-catalyst interface; “tandem-plate” chemical vapor deposition