THEY may be only 4 millimetres long, but the carbon nanotubes grown by researchers at Duke University in North Carolina are record-beaters.
Most nanotubes are just tenths of a millimetre long. But Jie Liu and colleagues found they could create longer nanotubes by blowing carbon monoxide over a hot silicon wafer covered with particles of a metal catalyst. Each particle seeds the growth of one nanotube. The nanotubes grow along the surface of the wafer in the direction of the gas flow: it takes about 20 minutes for them to reach their record length (Journal of the American Chemical Society,…
