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Spontaneous twisting of a collapsed carbon nanotube

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Abstract

We study the collapsing and subsequent spontaneous twisting of a carbon nanotube by in situ transmission electron microscopy (TEM). A custom-sized nanotube is first created in the microscope by selectively extracting shells from a parent multi-walled tube. The few-walled, large-diameter daughter nanotube is driven to collapse via mechanical stimulation, after which the ribbon-like collapsed tube spontaneously twists along its long axis. In situ diffraction experiments fully characterize the uncollapsed and collapsed tubes. The experimental observations and associated theoretical analysis indicate that the origin of the twisting is compressive strain.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the Director, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division, of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract #DE-AC02-05CH11231, within the Nanomachines Program (KC1203), which provided support for TEM characterization and the continuum model calculation; by the Office of Naval Research under contract N00014-16-1-2229 which provided support for collapsed nanoribbon synthesis; by the National Science Foundation under grant DMR- 1508412 which provided for total energy calculations, and by the Swedish Research Council (grant dnr 2015-00520) which provided support for HRB. Computational resources have been provided by the NSF through XSEDE resources at NICS.

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Author notes

  1. Sinisa Coh

    Present address: Materials Science and Mechanical Engineering, University of California Riverside, Riverside, CA, 92521, USA

  2. Claudia Ojeda-Aristizabal

    Present address: Department of Physics & Astronomy, California State University Long Beach, Long Beach, CA, 90840, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA

    Hamid Reza Barzegar, Aiming Yan, Sinisa Coh, Claudia Ojeda-Aristizabal, Gabriel Dunn, Marvin L. Cohen, Steven G. Louie & Alex Zettl

  2. Department of Physics, Umea University, 90187, Umea, Sweden

    Hamid Reza Barzegar, Eduardo Gracia-Espino & Thomas Wågberg

  3. Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA

    Hamid Reza Barzegar, Aiming Yan, Sinisa Coh, Claudia Ojeda-Aristizabal, Gabriel Dunn, Marvin L. Cohen, Steven G. Louie & Alex Zettl

  4. Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute at the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA

    Hamid Reza Barzegar, Aiming Yan, Gabriel Dunn & Alex Zettl

Authors
  1. Hamid Reza Barzegar
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  2. Aiming Yan
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  3. Sinisa Coh
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  4. Eduardo Gracia-Espino
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  7. Marvin L. Cohen
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  10. Alex Zettl
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alex Zettl.

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These authors contributed equally to this work.

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Barzegar, H.R., Yan, A., Coh, S. et al. Spontaneous twisting of a collapsed carbon nanotube. Nano Res. 10, 1942–1949 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-016-1380-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-016-1380-7

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