High Rate of Hydrogen Incorporation in Vertically Aligned Carbon
Nanotubes during Initial Stages of Growth Quantified by Elastic Recoil
Detection
- Publication date
- Publisher
Abstract
We quantified the amount of hydrogen
in as-grown vertically aligned multiwall CNTs at different stages
of growth using elastic recoil detection analysis (ERDA). We suggest
that hydrogen is associated with atomic defects and/or amorphous carbon
impurities formed at earlier deposition stages. We found that the
highest amount of hydrogen (2.3 wt %) was incorporated during the
initial growth stage (15–20 s). Our results show a decrease
of hydrogen content with increasing deposition time and/or with decreasing
growth rate, which points to dynamical self-annealing of hydrogen-saturated
defects. Consequently, the decrease of hydrogen-related defects leads
to a higher quality of MWCNTs, which can be easily detected by ERDA.
This research provides new insight into the nanotube growth mechanism
and provides a new characterization approach for quantifying hydrogen-saturated
atomic defects in MWCNTs