What are Some Uses for Carbon Nanotubes?
Carbon nanotubes are a relatively new allotrope of carbon that was synthesized as early as 1952 or before. They consist of carbon atoms bonded into a tube shape, sometimes with a single wall — called single-wall carbon nanotubes or SWCN — or multiple walls — called multi-wall carbon nanotubes. Although carbon nanotubes have likely been synthesized in small quantities and observed since the invention of the transmission electron microscope in 1938, their present-day popularity follows from a paper published by Japanese physicist Sumio Iijima in 1991. Much of modern-day literature on the topic erroneously credits Iijima with the discovery of carbon nanotubes. Nanotubes are considered a part of the fullerene family, of which buckyballs are another members. While nanotubes are carbon atoms in the shape of a cylinder, buckyballs are arranged into a ball. Carbon nanotubes have many remarkable properties which we are only just starting to exploit. First of all, carbon nanotubes are extremely
