A team of researchers from the School of Chemistry, including Dr Andrei Khlobystov, Dr Nick Besley and Dr Elena Bichoutskaia, in collaboration with Ulm University has shown for the first time that chemical reactions at the nano-level which change the structure of carbon nanotubes can be sparked by an ‘attack’ from within.
The discovery challenges previous scientific thinking that the internal surface of the hollow nanostructures is chemically unreactive, largely restricting their use to that of an inert container or a ‘nano-reactor’ inside which other chemical reactions can take place.
Their research, published in and selected as a highlight of the current issue of the journal Nature Chemistry, shows that carbon nanotubes that have had their structures changed are exciting new materials that could be useful in the development of new technologies for gas storage devices, chemical sensors and parts of electronic devices such as transistors.
Carbon nanotubes are remarkable nanostructures with a typical diameter of 1–2 nanometres, which is 80,000 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair. Dr Khlobystov and his research associates were recently involved in the discovery — published in Nature Materials — that nanotubes can be used as a catalyst for the production of nanoribbon, atomically thin strips of carbon created from carbon and sulphur atoms. These nanoribbons could potentially be used as new materials for the next generation of computers and data storage devices that are faster, smaller and more powerful.
In collaboration with the Electron Microscopy of Materials Science group at Ulm University in Germany, Dr Khlobystov and his research associates have even been able to capture ‘on camera’ the chemical reaction of a transition metal atom (rhenium) with the nanotube in real time at the atomic level using the latest Aberration-Corrected High Resolution Transmission Electron Microscopy (AC-HRTEM). Their videos show nanotubes with a diameter of just 1.5 nanometres.
Posted on Monday 22nd August 2011