The electrical behavior of carbon nanotubes under high pressure Original Research Article

The electrical resistance and capacitance of multiwalled carbon nanotubes produced by modified arc discharge were studied under pressure up to 20 GPa on a diamond anvil cell (DAC). The electrical resistance decreases gradually with pressure below 3.21 GPa and shows a bump around 5.0 GPa, and the capacitance exhibits a minimum value at 2.14 GPa, which corresponds to the changes of the electronic structure and lattice constants of carbon nanotubes under pressure. These results were conformed by the synchrotron X-ray diffraction and coincided with the prediction of the theoretical calculation.