Low-temperature synthesis of high-purity single-walled carbon nanotubes from alcohol

By using alcohol as the carbon source, a new simple catalytic chemical vapor deposition technique to synthesize high-purity single-walled carbon nanotubes at low temperature is demonstrated. Because of the etching effect of decomposed OH radical attacking carbon atoms with a dangling bond, impurities such as amorphous carbon, multi-walled carbon nanotubes, metal particles and carbon nanoparticles are completely suppressed even at relatively low reaction temperature such as 700–800 °C. By using methanol, generation of SWNTs even at 550 °C is demonstrated. The high-purity synthesis at low temperature promises large scale production at low cost and the direct growth of SWNTs on conventional semiconductor devices already patterned with aluminum.