Above a critical diameter, single- or few-walled carbon nanotubes spontaneously collapse as flattened carbon nanotubes. Raman spectra of isolated flattened and cylindrical carbon nanotubes have been recorded. The collapse provokes an intense and narrow D band, despite the absence of any lattice disorder. The curvature change near the edge cavities activates a D band, despite framework continuity. Theoretical calculations based on Placzek approximation fully corroborate this experimental finding. Usually used as a tool to quantify defect density in graphenic structures, the D band cannot be used as such in the presence of a graphene fold. This conclusion should serve as a basis to revisit materials comprising structural distortion where poor carbon organization was concluded on a Raman basis. Our finding also emphasizes the different visions of a defect between chemists and physicists, a possible source of confusion for researchers working in nanotechnologies.

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We show that polar molecules (water, ammonia, and nitrogen dioxide) adsorbed solely at the exposed edges of an encapsulated graphene sheet exhibit ferroelectricity, collectively orienting and switching reproducibly between two available states in response to an external electric field. This ferroelectric molecular switching introduces drastic modifications to the graphene bulk conductivity and produces a large and ambipolar charge bistability in micrometer-size graphene devices. This system comprises an experimental realization of envisioned memory capacitive ("memcapacitive") devices whose capacitance is a function of their charging history, here conceived via confined and correlated polar molecules at the one-dimensional edge of a two-dimensional crystal.