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Letter

Selective Growth of Well-Aligned Semiconducting Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes

Supporting Info

Lei Ding^†, Alexander Tselev^†, Jinyong Wang^‡, Dongning Yuan^†, Haibin Chu^†^‡, Thomas P. McNicholas^†, Yan Li*^‡ and Jie Liu*^†

Department of Chemistry, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708, and Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, Key Laboratory for the Physics and Chemistry of Nanodevices, National Laboratory of Rare Earth Material Chemistry and Application, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

Nano Lett., 2009, 9 (2), pp 800–805

DOI: 10.1021/nl803496s

Publication Date (Web): January 20, 2009

* Corresponding authors, j.liu@duke.edu and yanli@pku.edu.cn., †

Duke University.

, ‡

Peking University.

Abstract

High-density arrays of perfectly aligned single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) consisting almost exclusively of semiconducting nanotubes were grown on ST-cut single crystal quartz substrates. Raman spectroscopy together with electrical measurements of field effect transistors (FETs) fabricated from the as-grown samples showed that over 95% of the nanotubes in the arrays are semiconducting. The mechanism of selective growth was explored. It is proposed that introducing methanol in the growth process, combined with the interaction between the SWNTs and the quartz lattice, leads to the selective growth of aligned semiconducting nanotubes. Such a high density of horizontally aligned semiconducting SWNTs can be readily used in high current nanoFETs and sensors. This method demonstrates great promise to solve one of the most difficult problems which limits application of carbon nanotubes in nanoelectronicsthe coexistence of metallic and semiconducting nanotubes in samples produced by most, if not all, growth methods.