Materials

Synthesis of functional carbon nanostructured materials.

The synthesis of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) has overcome many challenges in the last decade. Especially those structures mainly formed by C atoms can nowadays be produced in large amounts and the samples can be purified and sorted by metallicity. We are interested in how to tailor the properties of the SWCNTs by changing their pristine form to make their functional for applications. We therefore investigate the catalysis and reaction control for nanotubes, nanowires and hybrid molecular nanostructures. We pay special attention to the SWCNT large scale production using powder-, floating- and supported-catalysts for CVD in flowing atmospheres as well as high vacuum (HV) CVD systems.