Carbon Nanotubes and Graphene - Research and Applications

A team of scientists, including researchers at Cambridge University, have successfully produced live video footage that shows how carbon nanotubes, more than 10,000 times smaller in diameter than a human hair, form. The video sequences show nanofibres and nanotubes nucleating around miniscule particles of nickel and are already offering greater insight into how these microscopic structures self-assemble.

These two videos show how the nickel reacts a process called catalytic chemical vapour deposition. This is one of several methods of producing nanotubes, and involves the application of a gas containing carbon (in this case acetylene) to minute crystalline droplets referred to as "catalyst islands" (the nickel).
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Nanofibres, which can be used in a variety of applications including biotechnology, nanocomposites and nanodevices, are usually produced by techniques such as electrospinning, lithography and molecular self-assembly. However, certain biological materials also contain nanofibres. For example, spider and silkworm silks contain tens of thousands of nanofibres that are about 30 nm across, and Feng and colleagues have succeeded in extracting these using high-frequency ultrasound at 20 kHz.
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