What is a single-wall carbon nanotube (SWCNT or SWNT)?
Graphite is made up of planes of carbon that form a hexagonal lattice, much like sheets of chicken wire. If you take one of these planes/sheets and roll them into a tube so that the overlapping hexagons line up with each other, you have a single-wall carbon nanotube. These tubes are generally 1-2 nm is diameter, similar to human DNA (~2 nm), and usually range from hundreds of nanometers to many microns in length.
