Shell Engineering of Carbon Nanotube Arrays by Current Driven Breakdown

This paper presents the controlled peeling of the shells of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) by electric breakdown. Investigations inside a transmission electron microscope (TEM) are used to correlate the changes in MWNT structure with the electrical measurements. Such electrically engineered nanotubes can be used as rotational and linear bearings in nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS). MWNT arrays, assembled using dielectrophoresis, are used to investigate the batch fabrication of such structures and initial experiments demonstrate the fabrication of MWNT linear bearings in parallel. This represents the first effort at engineering the shell structure on MWNTs deposited by a controlled batch process which, can be used to realize arrays of nanoscale bearings.