Room-temperature assembly of directional carbon nanotube strings

Micromold with microchannels was employed in assembly of directional free-standing single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNT) strings at room temperature. The new postgrowth assembly approach could, in principle, apply not only to a wide range of SWNTs in their soluble or dispersible forms, including small diameter (0.7-0.8 nm) SWNTs, covalent- and noncovalent-functionalized SWNTs, monodispersed SWNTs with identical diameter and chirality, and fullerenes@SWNTs, which either cannot survive the high-temperature treatment or cannot be synthesized by current CVD method, but also to other soluble or dispersible one-dimensional nanostructures.