Lu Jingyu, Miao Jianmin
School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 639798, Singapore.
Nanoscale Res Lett. 2012 Jul 1;7(1):356. doi: 10.1186/1556-276X-7-356.
Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have been under intense investigations during the past two decades due to their unique physical and chemical properties; however, there is still no commonly accepted growth mechanism to describe the growth behavior of CNTs. Here, we propose a nano Czochralski (CZ) model which regards the catalytic growth of a CNT as a CZ process taking place on the nano scale. The main idea is that, during the CNT growth, each catalyst particle acts as a nano crucible to nucleate and maintain the CNT growth, and the extruding CNT rotates relative to the nano crucible, leading to a chirality-dependent growth rate. In this case, the structural quality gradually changes along the CNT due to the dynamic generation-reconstruction-diffusion of defects during the CNT growth. The nano CZ mechanism may also apply to the catalytic growth of many other one-dimensional (1D) nanostructures (including various nanotubes and nanowires), thus further efforts will be stimulated in the quality and property control, as well as application explorations of these 1D nanomaterials.
在过去二十年中，碳纳米管（CNTs）因其独特的物理和化学性质而受到广泛研究；然而，目前仍没有一个被普遍接受的生长机制来描述碳纳米管的生长行为。在此，我们提出一种纳米提拉法（CZ）模型，该模型将碳纳米管的催化生长视为在纳米尺度上发生的提拉法过程。其主要思想是，在碳纳米管生长过程中，每个催化剂颗粒都充当一个纳米坩埚，用于成核并维持碳纳米管的生长，并且挤出的碳纳米管相对于纳米坩埚旋转，导致生长速率与手性相关。在这种情况下，由于碳纳米管生长过程中缺陷的动态产生 - 重构 - 扩散，其结构质量会沿碳纳米管逐渐变化。纳米提拉法机制也可能适用于许多其他一维（1D）纳米结构（包括各种纳米管和纳米线）的催化生长，因此将进一步推动对这些一维纳米材料的质量和性能控制以及应用探索的研究。
