NTRODUCTION The recent discovery of the existence of carbon nanotubes in the soot produced from the arc discharge of carbon electrodes, as well as the production of nanotubes in mac roscopic 23 has stimulated intensive research con quantities, cerning the structural and electronic properties of these inter- esting structures. Potential applications of carbon nanotubes include nanometer-size electronic and optical devices, and fiber reinforced material 4-3 There has recently been much theoretical work concerni ng the electronic structure of car bon nanotubes. It has been predicted that carbon nanotubes are metallic or semiconducting depending on the diameter d chirality of the nanotubes. Recently, scanning tunnel- and atomic force microscopy ing microscopy(STM) CAFM)s have been used to image carbon nanotubes. In this paper, we present STM images and STM current versus volt curves of carbon nanotubes hich show that aandatubes with diameters from 2.0 to 5.1 nma have a metallic debsity of states.
The scanning tunneling microscope used was made by Burleigh Instruments, Inc. Carbon nanotubes were grown using arc discharge of carbon electrodes at 500 Torr of He The nanotube samples were prepared for STM imaging by sonicating the carbon soot from the arc discharge in metha nol and placing a few drops on a highly oriented pyrolytic graphite(HOPG) substrate. The use of a metallic HOPG sub- strate instead of a semiconducting substrate, such as Si, lowed us to measure the I curves of nanotubes without interference from the band gap of the substrate. In addition, the high lateral conductivity of HoPG allowed us to measure the 1-r curves of nanotubes at small tip-sample voltages. The SST Mi imaging and I spectroscopy were performed in air using a mechanically cut Pt-Lr tip- Typical tip-sample voltages and tunneling currents used for imaging were 75
mv and 1.0 nA, respectively. The I-V curves were obtained by disengaging the feedback loop of the scanning tunneling microscope and measuring the tunneling current versus tip- sample voltage at a fixed tip-sample distance. The tunneling current was measured using a 12-bit analog-to-digital con- verter. Transmission electron(TEM) images of car bon nanotubes were obtained using a JEOL 100 and a Hitachi H9000 high-resolution 300 kev transmission elec tron microscope. The nanotube samples were prepared for TEM imaging using the procedure described above for STM imaging except a thin amorphous carbon film was used as the substrate.
Figure 1(a) shows a low magnification TEM image of the carbon soot from the arc discharge. Granular carbon material and filament-like structures corresponding to carbon nano- tubes are observed. Figure 1(b) shows a higher-resolution TEM image of the carbon nanotubes. The nanotubes in Fig 1(b) have diameters on the order of 5 mm and greater- Figure 1(c) shows a TEM image of nanotubes sticking out of the granular carbon material Figure 2(a) shows a top view STM image of a 1 X 1 Auma area of a carbon nanotube sample prepared as described above on a HOPG substrate. The STM image shows a high contrast between the carbon soot material and the smooth surface of the HOPG. The clumping of the soot material is similar to that observed in the TEM image of Fig. 10a). Fig- ure 20a) reveals the existence, in the region indicated by the arrow, of aligned nanotubes approximately 1 10 14O nm in length. The nanotubes stick out of the carbon soot material in a manner similar to that observed in the TEM images of Figs 1(a) and(c). Therefore, we do not believe these nanotubes are spurious structures from the HoPG substrate. Such spu rious structures have been reported to resemble biological structures such as DNA 12 Figure 20b) shows a higher resolution three-dimensional topographic STM image of the region indicated by the arrow in Fig. 2a). From Fig. 2b
45 nma FIG. 1. (a) TEM image of carbon soot showing granular carbon material and carbon nanotubes. Cb) Higher-resolution TEM image of carbon nanotubes(c) EM image of carbon nanotubes sticking out of the granular carbon material. the diameters of the nanotubes are measured to be from 5.O to 7.o nm Figure 20c) shows a STM line scan starting at the point indicated by the arrow in Fig. 20b) and going horizon tally across the surface. The line scan clearly shows the soot
FIG. 2. Top view STM image of carbon soot from the arc discharge depos- ited on a HOPG substrate. Carbon nanotubes are observed sticking out of the carbon soot in the region indicated by the arrow. (b) Higher-resolution three-dimensional STM image of the region indicated by the arrow in(a). The observed nanotubes have diameters between 5.0 and 7.0 nm. (c) Line scan starting at the point indicated by the arrow and going horizontally across the surface. Three nanotubes are observed on the right with dimen- sions consistent with the TEM results. material to the right and three nanotubes to