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nanotube

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nanotube

A carbon molecule that resembles a cylinder made out of chicken wire one to two nanometers in diameter by any number of millimeters in length. Accidentally discovered by a Japanese researcher at NEC in 1990 while making Buckyballs, they have potential use in many applications. With a tensile strength 10 times greater than steel at about one quarter the weight, nanotubes are considered the strongest material for their weight known to mankind.

Myriad Applications
Currently used to strengthen plastics and carbon fibers, nanotubes have the potential for making ultra-strong fabrics as well as reinforcing structural materials in buildings, cars and airplanes. Nanotubes are already a component in Nantero's non-volatile memory chips (see NRAM), and they are expected in more electronics such as sensors and display screens. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) may replace silicon transistors in integrated circuits (chips), and such prototypes were developed as far back as the late 1990s.

Single Walled and Multiwalled
Single-walled nanotubes (SWNTs) use a single sheath of graphite one atom thick, called "graphene." Multiwalled nanotubes (MWNTs) are either wrapped into multiple layers like a parchment scroll or are constructed of multiple cylinders, one inside the other. See Buckyball, graphene, nanotechnology and NRAM.


The Chicken Wire Tube
At the molecular level, a single-walled carbon nanotube looks a lot like rolled up chicken wire with hexagonal cells. The number of applications that may ultimately benefit from carbon nanotubes is enormous.
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References in periodicals archive
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The IBM team has tested nanotube transistors with that design, but so far it hasn't found a way to position the nanotubes closely enough together, because existing chip technology can't work at that scale.
Carbon nanotubes could step in to sustain Moore's law: chips made with nanotube transistors, which could be much faster than today's products, should be ready around 2020, says IBM
Chiral (2, 1) GaN Nanotubes. The band structure plot of chiral (2, 1) type pristine GaN nanotube shows a very small indirect band gap of about 0.072 eV, shown in Figure 4.
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We present herein new evidence that adhesion between the surface and the nanotube-modified AFM tip can significantly alter the mechanical behavior of the nanotube [36].
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"The lithium dopes the nanotube film, which turns from black to red, and the film, in turn, diffuses the lithium ions," he added.
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Nanotubes Change the Shape of Water
In order to align the direction of carbon nanotubes with the direction of heat removal, Fujitsu Laboratories developed a carbon nanotube manufacturing process in which the temperature and pressure for nanotube synthesis were precisely controlled with respect to the metal-particle catalyst, and the position of the feedstock gas inlet was adjusted relative to the substrate so that a dense, uniform array of carbon nanotubes grew perpendicularly.
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