Atlas shows way to colorful carbon nanotube films

[upamfva]

Nanomaterials researchers from Finland, the US and China have created a color atlas for 466 unique varieties of single-walled carbon nanotubes. The atlas is detailed in a paper in Advanced Materials that reports a new method for predicting the specific colors of thin films made by combining any of the 466 varieties. The research was conducted by researchers from Aalto University in Finland, Rice University and Peking University in China.Get more news about carbon nanotube film,you can vist our website!

"Carbon, which we see as black, can appear transparent or take on any color of the rainbow," said Aalto physicist Esko Kauppinen, the corresponding author of the paper. "The sheet appears black if light is completely absorbed by carbon nanotubes in the sheet. If less than about half of the light is absorbed in the nanotubes, the sheet looks transparent. When the atomic structure of the nanotubes causes only certain colors of light, or wavelengths, to be absorbed, the wavelengths that are not absorbed are reflected as visible colors."

Carbon nanotubes are long, hollow carbon molecules, similar in shape to a garden hose but with sides just one atom thick and diameters about 50,000 times smaller than a human hair. The outer walls of nanotubes are made of rolled graphene. And the wrapping angle of the graphene can vary, much like the angle of a roll of holiday gift wrap paper. If the gift wrap is rolled carefully, at zero angle, the ends of the paper will align with each side of the gift wrap tube. If the paper is wound carelessly, at an angle, the paper will overhang one end of the tube.

The atomic structure and electronic behavior of each carbon nanotube is dictated by its wrapping angle, or chirality, and its diameter. These two traits are represented in a '(n,m)' numbering system that catalogs 466 varieties of nanotubes, each with a characteristic combination of chirality and diameter. Each (n,m) type of nanotube has a characteristic color.

Kauppinen's research group has studied carbon nanotubes and nanotube thin films for years. Previously, the group succeeded in mastering the fabrication of colored nanotube thin films that appeared green, brown and silver-grey.

In the new study, Kauppinen's team examined the relationship between the spectrum of absorbed light and the visual color of various thicknesses of dry nanotube films. This allowed them to develop a quantitative model that can unambiguously identify the coloration mechanism for nanotube films, and also predict the specific colors of films made up of tubes with different inherent colors and (n,m) designations.

Rice engineer and physicist Junichiro Kono, whose lab solved the mystery of colorful armchair nanotubes in 2012, provided films made solely of (6,5) nanotubes that were used to calibrate and verify the Aalto model. Researchers from Aalto and Peking universities used the model to calculate the absorption of the Rice film and its visual color. Experiments showed that the measured color of the film corresponded quite closely to the color forecast by the model.

The Aalto model shows that the thickness of a nanotube film, as well as the color of nanotubes it contains, affects the film's absorption of light. The research showed that the thinnest and most colorful tubes affect visible light more than those with larger diameters and faded colors.

"Esko's group did an excellent job in theoretically explaining the colors, quantitatively, which really differentiates this work from previous studies on nanotube fluorescence and coloration," Kono said.

Since 2013, Kono's lab has pioneered a method for making highly ordered 2D nanotube films. Kono said he had hoped to supply Kauppinen's team with highly ordered 2D crystalline films of nanotubes of a single chirality.

"That was the original idea, but unfortunately we did not have appropriate single-chirality aligned films at that time," Kono said. "In the future, our collaboration plans to extend this work to study polarization-dependent colors in highly ordered 2D crystalline films."