Do nanotubes have length without limit?
When nanotubes were first discovered in the early 1990s, researchers envisaged applications such as continuous thin ropes for a “space elevator” that would link the earth to objects in space. But such applications, which would exploit the unparalleled strength and stiffness of nanotubes, require the growth of ultra-long nanotubes that can be woven into macroscopic fibers. In the October 2004 issue of Nature Materials, Yuntian Zhu and colleagues from Los Alamos National Laboratory report the growth of single-walled carbon nanotubes with no apparent length limit. Zhu and colleagues used vapor deposition in combination with a metal catalyst to…
