Controlled synthesis of carbon nanocoils and carbon nanotubes on common paper substrates

The commercially available copy papers and pure papers have been adopted to synthesize carbon nanomaterials. It is found that carbon nanocoils (CNCs) are efficiently synthesized on the copy paper substrates using Fe2(SO4)3/SnCl2 catalyst by a thermal chemical vapor deposition method, while only carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are obtained on the pure paper substrate using the same process. It is evidenced that the particles of calcium carbonate existing in copy paper aggregate catalyst and adsorb more sulfur elements which promote the growth of CNCs. In addition, CNCs can successfully grow out from the pure paper by adding calcium carbonate.