On March 12, Angewandte ChemieInternational Edition publishes How a Zigzag Carbon Nanotube Grows, a research paper completed by ECNU associate professor Yuan Qinghong. This study successfully explained the broad experimental observation of the lacking of zigzag (ZZ) carbon nanotubes (CNTs) in CNT samples and completed the theory of CNT growth.
Illustration of the growth behaviors of ZZ SWCNTs.
The production of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) with any desired atomic structure is crucially important for many applications because each type of SWCNT has its own electronic properties, uniquely depending on its chiral indexes. Experimentally, such a goal can be achieved by the post-growth sorting of various SWCNTs samples1 or by the chirality selective growth of SWCNTs during chemical vapor deposition (CVD) processes as extensively explored experimentally and theoretically.
Yuan Qinghong
Through first-principle calculations, Yuan and her colleagues found that, because of the high energy barrier of initiating a new carbon ring at the rim of a ZZ CNT, the growth rate of a ZZ CNT is proportional to its diameter and significantly (10–1000 times) slower than that of other CNTs. And this study have successfully explained the long standing experimental puzzle of why there is little ZZ CNT in most experimental samples.
Angewandte Chemie(German pronunciation: [ˈʔaŋɡəˌvantə çeˈmiː], meaning Applied Chemistry) is a weekly peer-reviewed scientific journal that is published by Wiley-VCH on behalf of the German Chemical Society. Publishing formats include feature length reviews, short highlights, research communications, minireviews, essays, book reviews, meeting reviews, correspondences, corrections, and obituaries. This journal contains review articles covering all aspects of chemistry. Its current impact factor is 11.336
