Diameter Dependence of Aligned Growth of Carbon Nanotubes on a-Plane Sapphire Substrates

Aligned carbon nanotubes have great potential for advanced nanotube transistors and integrated circuits. In this article, we studied the carbon nanotube alignment mechanism using a chemical vapor deposition growth on a-plane sapphire substrates. We synthesized carbon nanotubes of different diameters by controlling the catalyst size and observed that nanotubes of smaller diameters had a higher degree of alignment. In addition, a surprising observation was that misaligned nanotubes had a preferred orientation. Furthermore, we developed a numerical simulation method to calculate interaction energy between a-plane sapphire surface and carbon nanotubes of different diameters. The calculated results were in good agreement with our experimental observations, which confirmed the observed diameter-dependent alignment and the preferred orientation for misaligned nanotubes.