Carbon Nanotubes and Graphene - Research and Applications

The sonication of SWCNTs with a variety of biomolecules, and subsequent purification, resulted in formation of stable isotropic dispersions. These biodispersions were drop cast onto several conducting substrates to form smooth adherent biofilms. When these biofilms were immersed into phosphate buffer they became hydrated and formed a conducting gel with lower impedance than the underlying substrate. The neurotrophic factor NT-3 was incorporated into this formulation and with the application of an electrical stimulus to the conducting gel resulted in an increase in the rate of NT-3 release.
It was found that the conducting gels served as an excellent platform for fibroblast cell growth. The absence of cytotoxicity, combined with a conducting and biofactor release capabilities suggest that these novel composite materials are likely to be good candidates for use biomedical applications. Given the interest in the use of electrical stimulation to enhance mammalian cell adhesion, proliferation and differentiation and the emerging interest in the use of
preferred nanotopographies to engender similar effects, these new biomaterial platforms have interesting and relevant features.
(From: Thompson BC et al., Carbon (2009), in press, doi:10.1016/j.carbon.2009.01.013)

Due to the unique scheme of the energetic levels and high electron affinity energy of and including laser and fullerenes carbon nanotubes, these nanoobjects are widely used for different areas of application display techniques. In the present paper, the attenuation and switching of the laser beam has been shown, based on the features of electrooptical nematic liquid crystal mesophase under condition of the nanoobjects sensitization.

(Natalia A. Shurpo, Sergey V. Serov, Alexandra V. Shmidt, Hakob L. Margaryan, Natalia V. Kamanina, Diamond and Related Materials, 2009, article in press)

In this paper, we report a method based on nanosphere lithography technology for the synthesis of nano-pitched vertically aligned multi-walled carbon nanotube array. A monolayer of polystyrene nanospheres with diameter of 650 nm was coated on silicon oxide layer to create hexagonally arranged patterns. A metal layer, which acted as a catalyst for carbon nanotube growth, was deposited on the patterns by e-beam evaporation method. Nano-sized metallic patterns were formed by removing the polystyrene nanospheres. Uniform CNT arrays with pitch of 800 nm were successfully synthesized from the metallic patterns by plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition. Using nanosphere lithography, the pitch of the single CNT array can be well-controlled. Therefore, the as-grown CNTs have potential applications in advanced interconnects technology and other nano applications.

(Ting Xu, Jianmin Miao, Mohammed Ashraf, Nay Lin, Franck Chollet, Materials Letters 2009, in press)