What is the difference between carbon fiber, carbon nanofiber, carbon nanotubes, and “buckyballs”?
Buckyballs, nanotubes, and nanofibers form a continuum of carbon nanomaterials. Buckyballs are single fullerene molecules of carbon, such as C60, C70, etc. Single wall nanotubes (SWNT) are effectively the cylindrical version of buckyballs – a tube of carbon atoms with a diameter equal to that of a corresponding spherical buckyball (~1.2 nm), and which may have buckyball hemispheres as end caps. A nanotube may have additional concentric cylinders of carbon, in which case it is a multiwall nanotube (MWNT, typically ~3-10 nm). Some nanotubes are formed by a process that involves growth from a metal catalyst particle. In some cases, particularly smaller diameter nanotubes, the catalyst particle is thought to dance around the end of the nanotube, adding carbon atoms to the structure as it goes. In larger nanotubes, the catalyst particle remains static at the end of the tube, and adds to the entire rim of the cylinder at once, and a MWNT is usually formed. For smaller nanotubes, the allowed
