Structural origin of coiling in coiled carbon nanotubes

Statistical Investigation of Regularly Coiled Carbon Nanotubes

Regularly coiled carbon nanotubes are carbon nanotube type nanoarchitectures which exhibit amazingly regular coiling. This coiling is attributed to the presence of non-hexagonal rings in the honeycomb structure. According to the models we proposed earlier, the non-hexagonal rings, together with hexagons constitute a novel type of graphitic structure, named haeckelite. To decide if the experimentally observed coils are based on haeckelite-type structure or not, we investigated by TEM the pitch and coil diameter of more than 200 catalytically grown carbon nanotubes.

The correlated 2D histogram, the "Manhattan plot" shows that there are certain stability islands in which most of the observed coils are found, while in other regions no coils were observed.




This is strong evidence that regular coiling is governed by certain haeckelite structures which have higher stability, while the less stable haeckelite structures yield the randomly curved, usual CVD carbon nanotubes.

References

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