Low pressure CVD growth of single-wall carbon nanotubes

The growth method of carbon nanotube (CNT) using catalytic chemical vapor deposition (CCVD) has been widely used for CNT based device applications because it has advantages in terms of the facts that a low temperature growth is possible, and a position and a direction of the CNT growth are also possible. However, the quality of CNT is said not to be as good as one grown by other methods such as the laser ablation. Therefore, the development of a novel growth method for high-quality CNT is high needed. For this purpose, one way might be the use of the low pressure growth (Tnemura et al., 2005) using ultra high vacuum (UHV) chamber. In this paper, we report on single-wall carbon nanotube (SWNT) growth at the low pressure in UHV by using the ethanol gas and the Co catalyst.