On the Stability and Abundance of Single Walled Carbon Nanotubes

Many nanotechnological applications, using single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs), are only possible with a uniform product. Thus, direct control over the product during chemical vapor deposition (CVD) growth of SWNT is desirable, and much effort has been made towards the ultimate goal of chirality-controlled growth of SWNTs. We have used density functional theory (DFT) to compute the stability of SWNT fragments of all chiralities in the series representing the targeted products for such applications, which we compare to the chiralities of the actual CVD products from all properly analyzed experiments. From this comparison we find that in 84% of the cases the experimental product represents chiralities among the most stable SWNT fragments (within 0.2 eV) from the computations. Our analysis shows that the diameter of the SWNT product is governed by the well-known relation to size of the catalytic nanoparticles, and the specific chirality is normally determined by the product’s relative stability, suggesting thermodynamic control at the early stage of product formation. Based on our findings, we discuss the effect of other experimental parameters on the chirality of the product. Furthermore, we highlight the possibility to produce any tube chirality in the context of recent published work on seeded-controlled growth.