Chemical sensors based on individual single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) are demonstrated. Upon exposure to gaseous molecules such as NO(2) or NH(3), the electrical resistance of a semiconducting SWNT is found to dramatically increase or decrease. This serves as the basis for nanotube molecular sensors. The nanotube sensors exhibit a fast response and a substantially higher sensitivity than ...

The chemical reactivity of carbon nanotubes in H2SO4 is investigated using individual, single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) incorporated into electronic devices. Exploiting the device conductance as a sensitive indicator of chemical reactions, discrete oxidation and reduction events can be clearly observed. During oxidation, a SWNT opens circuits to a nanometer-scale tunnel junction with resi...

Measurements of the radial breathing modes from Raman Spectroscopy have been most useful in characterizing the diameters of single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWNT), where there is a simple monotonic relationship between frequency and diameter. Similar correlations have also been used to predict sizes for double and multiple wall nanotubes and for bundles of SWNT. However this can lead to significan...

The backscattering contribution to the conductivity, irrelevant for metallic single-walled carbon nanotubes, is proved to become much significant for doped semiconducting systems, in agreement with experiments. In the case of multi-walled nanotubes, the intershell coupling is further shown to enhance the contribution of backscattering for ”metallic” double-walled, whereas it remains insignifica...

We report a numerical investigation on the catalytic growth mechanism of a single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNT) inside a template SWNT, that is, formation of a double-walled carbon nanotube (DWNT). The molecular dynamics simulations together with complementary ab inito calculations suggest that the DWNT formation from thermally annealed metallocene-encapsulating SWNT goes through formation of m...

We present atomic-scale, video-rate environmental transmission electron microscopy and in situ time-resolved X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy of surface-bound catalytic chemical vapor deposition of single-walled carbon nanotubes and nanofibers. We observe that transition metal catalyst nanoparticles on SiOx support show crystalline lattice fringe contrast and high deformability before and durin...

The ozonization at the vacancy defect site of the single-walled carbon nanotube has been studied by static quantum mechanics and atom-centered density matrix propagation based ab initio molecular dynamics within a two-layered ONIOM approach. Among five different reaction pathways at the vacancy defect, the reaction involving the unsaturated active carbon atom is the most probable pathway, where...

Towards the development of a useful mechanism for hydrogen storage, we have studied the hydrogenation of single-walled carbon nanotubes with atomic hydrogen using core-level photoelectron spectroscopy and x-ray absorption spectroscopy. We find that atomic hydrogen creates C-H bonds with the carbon atoms in the nanotube walls, and such C-H bonds can be completely broken by heating to 600 degrees...

Here we represent thermodynamics on soluble carbon nanotubes that enables deep understanding the interactions between single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) and molecules. We selected sodium cholate and single-stranded cytosine oligo-DNAs (dCn (n = 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 15, and 20)), both of which are typical SWNT solubilizers, and successfully determined thermodynamic properties (ΔG, ΔH and ΔS va...