Nanotube Cloning Process Paves Way to Use Carbon in Future Electronics

Published on November 15, 2012 at 4:32 AM

The heart of the computer industry is known as "Silicon Valley" for a reason. Integrated circuit computer chips have been made from silicon since computing's infancy in the 1960s. Now, thanks to a team of USC researchers, carbon nanotubes may emerge as a contender to silicon's throne.

Chongwu Zhou holds up a piece of plastic substrate used to build nanoscale transistors and circuits.

Scientists and industry experts have long speculated that carbon nanotube transistors would one day replace their silicon predecessors. In 1998, Delft University built the world's first carbon nanotube transistors – carbon nanotubes have the potential to be far smaller, faster, and consume less power than silicon transistors.


Think of chirality like this: if you took a sheet of notebook paper and rolled it straight up into a tube, it would have a certain chirality. If you rolled that same sheet up at an angle, it would have a different chirality. In this example, the notebook paper represents a sheet of latticed carbon atoms that are rolled-up to create a nanotube.


Zhou worked with his group members Jia Liu, Chuan Wang, Bilu Liu, Liang Chen, and Ming Zheng and Xiaomin Tu of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland.

"Controlling the chirality of carbon nanotubes has been a dream for many researchers. Now the dream has come true." said Zhou. The team has already patented its innovation, and its research will be published Nov. 13 in Nature Communications.


The USC team's innovation was to jettison the catalyst and instead plant pieces of carbon nanotubes that have been separated and pre-selected based on chirality, using a nanotube separation technique developed and perfected by Zheng and his coworkers at NIST. Using those pieces as seeds, the team used chemical vapor deposition to extend the seeds to get much longer nanotubes, which were shown to have the same chirality as the seeds..

The process is referred to as "nanotube cloning." The next steps in the research will be to carefully study the mechanism of the nanotube growth in this system, to scale up the cloning process to get large quantities of chirality-controlled nanotubes, and to use those nanotubes for electronic applications.


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