Carbon nanotubes are a strong and conductive allotrope of carbon, with potential uses in fiber, armor, and electronics. They were discovered in 1991 and are often confused with buckyballs.
Carbon nanotubes are a relatively new allotrope of carbon. They consist of carbon atoms bonded in a tube shape, sometimes as single-walled carbon nanotubes and sometimes as multi-walled carbon nanotubes. While they have likely been synthesized in small quantities and observed since the invention of the transmission electron microscope in 1938, their current popularity stems from a paper published by Japanese physicist Sumio Iijima in 1991. Much of the modern literature on the subject incorrectly credits Iijima their discovery.
Nanotubes are considered a part of the fullerene family, of which buckyballs are another member. While they are cylinder-shaped carbon atoms, buckyballs are arranged into a ball.
Carbon nanotubes have many amazing properties that scientists are just starting to exploit. First of all, they are extremely strong, probably one of the strongest materials that is even theoretically possible. Although the tubes are only about a nanometer wide, they can be very long in relation to their width, a useful property for strength.
Although the longest nanotubes that have been synthesized today are only a few centimeters long, research is underway to make them longer, and when the “carbon nanotube string” hits the market, it will be the strongest fiber available. The fiber is so strong that it is the only fiber that could be spun into a space elevator (a sky bridge connecting a geosynchronous orbiting counterweight to a location on the ground) without snapping. Recently, they have been proposed as a building material for armor so strong that bullets ricochet directly off it.
Single-walled carbon nanotubes are excellent conductors, and many computer companies are developing ways to use them in computers. Their use will allow the computer industry to create more powerful computers than can be manufactured by the conventional method of photolithography.
Carbon nanotubes are capable of ballistic electron transport, which means they are very good conductors in the direction of the tube. This has led them to be proposed as the ideal building material for the next generation of televisions, although improvements in LCDs, including OLCDs, make this unlikely in the foreseeable future.
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