Formation of Single-Wall Carbon Nanotube Superbundles

Since their discovery in 1993, carbon single-wall nanotubes (SWNTs) have been of great interest because of their expected novel electronic, mechanical, and gas adsorption properties. Difficulties arise in measuring these various properties because the SWNTs currently available for analyses have very small bundle sizes (10-20 nm) and are typically in random orientations. A vital step for the industrial application of SWNTs is to align the individual tubes into bundles of a size that allows facile measurement of the various physical and chemical properties. This paper is the first to illustrate a set of procedures for the preparation and isolation of aligned SWNT 'superbundles'.