Carbon Nanotubes

Abstract

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are the subject of the latest chapter of the long story of carbon fibers, initiated in the nineteenth century by the Edison’s interest in filaments for light bulbs and continued during the twentieth century by space and aircraft industries, as carbon fibers form light-weight, very stiff materials. CNTs were discovered at NEC laboratories by Iijima in 1991 [197]. They present very peculiar physical properties and, in particular, a large variety of electrical behaviors, ranging from those of a semimetal with charge carriers mimicking massless Dirac particles [162], to semiconductors with band gaps varying from zero to about 1 eV, and even superconductors. For such reasons, they immediately generated a fascinating new field of solid-state physics, intensively studied for both basic research and possible industrial applications.