Nanotube shows utility as a microscope probe

17 Jun 2002

Richard Smalley at Rice University has managed to glue single carbon nanotubes to the tips of scanning tunneling microscopes and scanning force microscopes. Nanotubes are structures several microns long but only 5-20 nm wide. The resulting probes are conductive, reproducible, and sturdy since they flex instead of snapping when they make contact with atoms in the sample