1] Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, Department of Chemistry, and the Richard Smalley Institute, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005, USA [2].
Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, Department of Chemistry, and the Richard Smalley Institute, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005, USA.
Nat Commun. 2014 Sep 16;5:4892. doi: 10.1038/ncomms5892.
Carbon nanotubes hold enormous technological promise. It can only be harnessed if one controls their chirality, the feature of the tubular carbon topology that governs all the properties of nanotubes-electronic, optical, mechanical. Experiments in catalytic growth over the last decade have repeatedly revealed a puzzling strong preference towards minimally chiral (near-armchair) tubes, challenging any existing hypotheses and making chirality control ever more tantalizing, yet leaving its understanding elusive. Here we combine the nanotube/catalyst interface thermodynamics with the kinetic growth theory to show that the unusual near-armchair peaks emerge from the two antagonistic trends at the interface: energetic preference towards achiral versus the faster growth kinetics of chiral nanotubes. This narrow distribution is inherently related to the peaked behaviour of a simple function, xe(-x).
碳纳米管具有巨大的技术潜力。只有控制其手性，即管状碳拓扑结构的特征，才能利用其特性来控制纳米管的电子、光学和机械性能。过去十年中，在催化生长方面的实验反复揭示了一种令人费解的对最小手性（近扶手椅）管的强烈偏好，这挑战了任何现有假设，并使得手性控制更加诱人，但对手性控制的理解仍然难以捉摸。在这里，我们将纳米管/催化剂界面热力学与动力学生长理论相结合，表明异常的近扶手椅峰源于界面上的两种对立趋势：对非手性的能量偏好与手性纳米管更快的生长动力学。这种狭窄的分布与简单函数 xe(-x) 的峰值行为有着内在的关系。
