Template Synthesis of Water-Dispersible Carbon Nano “Test Tubes” without Any Post-treatment

Abstract

Figure S1. A photo of water suspension of carbon nano 'test tubes' liberated from the template after Ar ion beam sputtering.

Carbon nanotubes prepared by anodic aluminum oxide template method

“…Therefore, the length of AAO-CNTs reported by now is generally shorter than 100 m. And the shortest AAO-CNTs reported are about 0.5 m [76]. The difficulty in getting even shorter AAO-CNTs lies in the controlled preparation of very thin and free standing AAO films.…”

“…As a result, AAOCNTs with outer diameters ranging from 20 to 200 nm can be easily prepared [46,47,[79][80][81]. AAO film with channel size smaller than 20 nm can also be synthesized by selecting low voltage or in dilute sulfuric acid at low temperature (near 0°C) [76,82]. SEM images of the AAO-CNTs with outer diameters of 100, 30, and 10 nm are shown in Figure 5.…”

“…The smallest outer diameter of AAO-CNTs was reported to be ~10 nm [76]. Even smaller CNTs are required for some applications such as filter membrane, catalyst supports, and electronic devices.…”

“…The length of CNTs is also an important factor influencing their properties. Orikasa et al [76] reported that carbon nano test tubes (one side open CNTs) with lengths of 5 m or less were soluble in water without further modification. More importantly, short length CNTs are preferred in some practical applications, such as catalyst supports [143], biological imaging [146], molecular sensing [147], etc.…”

Lyotropic liquid crystal directed synthesis of nanostructured materials

“…The templates are divided into hard templates and soft templates. Hard templates usually include silica [12], anodic aluminum oxide [13][14][15] and mesoporous carbon [16][17][18][19][20]. The soft templates have received more attention over the last decade for the generation of nanostructured materials [21,22], because they are more versatile and therefore more advantageous than hard templates.…”