Tiny tubes hold big promise for nanoscale devices

17 Jun 2002

A team of researchers from three institutions has carried out a chemical reaction in what may be the world's smallest set of test tubes: carbon nanotubes with inside diameters of less than ten nanometers and lengths of just one micron. The work, reported in the 13 December issue of the journal Science, could ultimately have important applications in microelectronics and other fields in which extremely small conductors and other structures would allow production of new types of nanoscale devices.

"We have demonstrated that you can put materials into nanotubes and manipulate them to induce a chemical reaction," said Dr. Walter A. de Heer, a professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "This work opens up new ways of thinking about structures that can act like extremely small test tubes."

Other members of the team were at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland and Laboratorio Nacional de Luz Sincotron in Brazil.