1. Introduction
Recently, preparation of organic–inorganic or inorganic–inorganic
hybrid materials has attracted increasing attentions due to
their promising physical and chemical properties. Among them,
silica gel beads with mesoporosity have widely been used as adsorbents,
supporting materials for catalyst, column packing materials
for chromatography and so on. Once mesopores of silica gel beads
could be coated by carbon, improvement of electrical and thermal
conductivity as well as chemical stability of the porous structure
would be anticipated and some prospects of novel applications
would be further extended.
One of the most useful methods to prepare an organic–inorganic
hybrid is deposition of organic substances on core materials
in a gas phase. Colin and Guiochon [1] and Bebris et al. [2,3] prepared
silica gels coated with pyrolytic carbon by chemical vapor
deposition (CVD) of benzene on silica gels. Leboda also reported
a similar method to deposit dichloromethane vapor on silica gels
[4]. Although the amount of carbon deposited on the silica gels