By Wolfgang Bacsa

- Nanostructured Materials, NanoOptics

Key words :

Who discovered carbon nanotubes? - All you need to know about the discovery of carbon nanotubes.

By Wolfgang Bacsa

- Nanostructured Materials, NanoOptics

6 Sep, 2006 05:06 pm

comment(s) 2

On reading articles in newspapers and science and technology magazines one gets that impression that Suomo Iijima, a scientist at NEC Japan, is the unique discoverer of carbon nanotubes. While it is certainly obvious that S. Iijima made at least two key contributions to this field, careful analysis of the literature shows that he is most certainly not the first who reported about carbon nanotubes.

On reading articles in newspapers and science and technology magazines one gets that impression that Suomo Iijima, a scientist at NEC Japan, is the unique discoverer of carbon nanotubes. While it is certainly obvious that S. Iijima made at least two key contributions to this field, careful analysis of the literature shows that he is most certainly not the first who reported about carbon nanotubes. Already in the seventies, there have been reports on the existence of carbon tubes with nanometer diameter from scientists working on different forms of graphite in France and Japan.

In fact, M Endo from Japan was interested in carbon fibers and was collaborating with A Oberlin in France, reported on the observation of carbon nanotubes by electron microscopy in 1976. In Russia, LV Radushkevich and collaborators reported about carbon nanotubes as early as 1952. Hence, Carbon nanotubes were shown to exist but no fabrication process was known that would lead to the synthesis of macroscopic amounts of carbon nanotubes. As a result, not much interest sparked from these early reports on carbon nanotubes. Unrelated to this first work on carbon nanotubes, S. Iijima was working on diamond like carbon at NEC. Diamond like carbon, a disordered form of diamond, was and still is of much interest for industrial applications. Interestingly, in one of his older publications on diamond like carbon, rod or tube like objects can be seen in the electron microscopy images but they again did not attract much interest.

It was at this point in time that Donald Huffman in Arizona, US, and Wolfgang Krätschmer in Heidelberg, Germany discovered the arc evaporation method to produce macroscopic amounts of C60, a carbon molecule in the shape of a soccer ball. S. Iijima studied the arc evaporation process that efficiently produced C60 for a certain He gas pressure. When analyzing the content of a cylindrical electrode deposit produced during arc evaporation for different He pressures, Iijima found large amounts of multiwalled carbon nanotubes mixed with faceted graphitic particles. This was a great breakthrough and the discovery was unexpected in that the same method that produced macroscopic amounts of C60 did also produce macroscopic amounts of multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs). Even more surprising is that at the time this breakthrough was published in the journal Nature, a small startup company in Boston (Hyperion Catalysis) was already producing carbon fibrils. Carbon fibrils are produced in a chemical vapor deposition process. This process is now used commonly to produce carbon nanotubes. The fibrils are indeed carbon nanotubes with only a few walls that are not straight but are bent and contain characteristic defects. S. Iijima after having discovered that large amounts of multiwalled carbon nanotubes can be produced by the arc method aimed at filling the tubes with metals. Transition metals were mixed into the electrode. The arc produced this time was not the expected metal filled carbon nanotubes but a new form of carbon nanotubes: single shell carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) with a diameter in the 1.1-1.3nm range. Nearly simultaneously, D Bethune a scientist at IBM research laboratory working on C60 made the same discovery.

So, who discovered carbon nanotubes? While this must really be the group of Radushkevich and Endo, only later discoveries by Iijima led to the spate of activity in this field resulting in significant breakthroughs in structure-property correlations. We realize that it is not enough to know that carbon nanotubes exist but we need to be able to produce macroscopic amounts to make use of them. S. Iijima’s key contributions and contributions of many devoted scientists, who came subsequently on the scene, show that there is a long way from discovery to taking full advantage of the unique physical and chemical properties of carbon nanotubes. -
Details about the discovery of carbon nanotubes can be found in CARBON 44 (2006) 1621.
See also:
Radushkevich L.V., Lukyanovich V.M., Zurn Fisic Chim 1952; 111:24
Oberlin A., Endo M., Koyama T. Filamentous growth of carbon through benzene decomposition, J Cryst Growth 1976; 32: 335
Ijima S., Helical microtubules of graphite carbon, Nature 1991; 354: 56
Ijima S., Ichihashi T. Single-shell carbon nanotubes of 1-nm diameter, Nature 1993; 363: 603
Bethune D.S. et al. Cobalt catalysed growth of carbon nanotubes with single atomic layer walls, Nature 1993; 363: 605

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2 comment(s)

[1]

Comment by mary jane

18 Apr, 2007 08:09 pm

what up

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[2]

Comment by amanda

4 May, 2007 04:06 pm

who was the element of carbon
discover?

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NanoScience

By Wolfgang Bacsa

nanoscience,

nanotubes

carbon

discovery

Who discovered carbon nanotubes? - All you need to know about the discovery of carbon nanotubes.

By Wolfgang Bacsa

nanoscience,

nanotubes

carbon

discovery

More contributions

Nano-capacitors: the root towards the super power battery

Nanoparticles come at the top of occupational chemical risks

Future War Revisited

Nanotechnology's True Potential

Reinventing optical microscopy with nanotubes