Automated manipulation of carbon nanotubes using atomic force microscopy.

The manipulation of carbon nanotubes is an important and essential step for carbon-based nanodevice or nanocircuit assembly. However, the conventional push-and-image approach of manipulating carbon nanotubes using atomic force microscopy has low efficiency on account of the reduplicated scanning process during manipulation. In this article, an automated manipulation system is designed and tested. This automated manipulation system, which includes an atomic force microscope platform and a self-developed computer program for one-dimensional manipulation, is capable of automatically moving any assigned individual carbon nanotube to a defined target location without any intermediate scanning procedure. To demonstrate the high-efficiency of this automated manipulation system and its potential applications in nanoassembly, two experiments were conducted. The first experiment used this system to manipulate a carbon nanotube to a defined target location. In the second experiment, this system was used to automatically manipulate several carbon nanotubes for generating and translating a defined pattern of nanotubes.