New Nanomaterials

The realization of new materials can enable ground-breaking, as opposed to conventional, advances in science and technology. Our group is committed to the discovery and development of new nanoscale structures and materials, particularly carbon nanotubes, with an emphasis on ultra-precise growth control at different length scales, morphology, size, structure, etc, since these will define and enable control over physical and chemical properties One of our core technologies is water-assisted CVD, an approach developed by us in 2004, where the addition of a small and controlled amount of water to the synthetic ambient was found to dramatically increase the growth yield (denoted "Super Growth"). Super-growth represents a major breakthrough in the carbon nanotube field, simultaneously addressing many critical problems, such as scalability, purity, and cost that had plagued the use of carbon nanotubes for real applications and opens up new opportunities ranging from biology to nanodevice and optical applications. In our group, there are many ongoing projects that take advantage of Super-growth to develop exciting new research and application frontiers, as well as projects that put efforts to pursue the ultimate syntheses that can grow carbon nanotubes with completely defined structures.

The power of Super Growth to control the grown nanotube structure is shown in this figure. All of these structures, each composed of millions of aligned and pure single-walled carbon nanotubes were fabricated by simply patterning the catalyst and controlling the growth. These structures can serve as interesting starting material or building blocks to develop rational and innovative applications and devices, as will be demonstrated in the future by several ongoing research projects in our group.

In the intensely competitive nanomaterials synthesis race, faster and more powerful tools, in addition to our minds, are imperative to maintain our lead. As synthesis is central to the whole effort of the group, we have developed several generations of our own computer-controlled CVD systems that can grow samples and implement any sophisticated synthesis processes, fully-automatically. The system is connected to the internet and can be watched by cameras, so if desired, you can carry out CVD while drinking wine at your home on your sofa. We have two dedicated clean-rooms installed with 11 CVD systems designed for various purposes, and we believe that our facilities are most advanced in the world for nanomaterial syntheses. (We definitely have the highest density of CVD systems per square foot!) With one full-automatic furnace, you can run 50 CVDs a day at maximum, during which time you can focus your attention on other aspects of your research. These powerful tools have been developed to significantly accelerate your research while simultaneously enabling highly reproducible and precisely-controlled growth.

Frequently, the availability of materials limit the research and development of applications, and SWNTs are no different, where their mass production is the key factor in establishing a CNT industry. Our group is committed to and actively engaged in developing methods for mass production of economical, pure, and high quality SWNTs based on the Super Growth. We are running a 5 year/ $20million national project to pursue this goal. For SWNTs to become a widely used industrial material, the cost must be reduced to the level of classic carbons, such as activated carbon or carbon-fibers. This translates to a 100-fold to 1000-fold reduction in production cost in the future. We believe that this problem will eventually be solved by the very high growth efficiency of Super-growth that can already produce more than 1 g of SWNTs in ten minutes on a A4 (20x30cm) substrate.