Semiconducting nanotubes produced in quanti...( DURHAM N.C. -- After announcing last...)

DURHAM, N.C. -- After announcing last April a method for growing exceptionally long, straight, numerous and well-aligned carbon cylinders only a few atoms thick, a Duke University-led team of chemists has now modified that process to create exclusively semiconducting versions of these single-walled carbon nanotubes.

The achievement paves the way for manufacturing reliable electronic nanocircuits at the ultra-small billionths of a meter scale, said Jie Liu, Duke's Jerry G. and Patricia Crawford Hubbard Professor of Chemistry, who headed the effort.

"I think it's the holy grail for the field," Liu said. "Every piece is now there, including the control of location, orientation and electronic properties all together. We are positioned to make large numbers of electronic devices such as high-current field-effect transistors and sensors."

A report on their achievement, co-authored by Liu and a team of collaborators from his Duke laboratory and Peking University in China, was published Jan 20, 2009 in the research journal Nano Letters. Their work was funded by the United States Naval Research Laboratory, the National Science Foundation of China, carbon nanotube manufacturer Unidym Inc., Duke University and the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China.

Liu has filed for a patent on the method. A post doctoral researcher in his laboratory, Lei Ding, was first author of the new report as well as the previous study http://news.duke.edu/2008/04/stnanotubes.html published April 16, 2008, in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS).

That earlier JACS report described how the researchers coaxed forests of nanotubes to form in long, parallel paths that will not cross each other to impede potential electronic performance. Their method grows the nanotubes on a template made of a continuous and unbroken kind o
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