At normal conditions, the only stable crystallographic modification of carbon is graphite. The quasi-stable diamond turns into graphite starting from about 1000 ºC in air. In industry, a graphitic material is commonly called either carbon, if it consists of small and low-oriented crystallites, or graphite, the material with a highly ordered structure. In the 1970s, the first carbon filaments of about 7 nm in diameter were grown by Morinobu Endo at the University of Orleans, France, by the vapor-growth technique. In 1985, Sir Harold Walter Kroto of Sussex University, UK, and Richard E. Smalley and coworkers at Rice University discovered spherical carbon molecules, C60 (or C-60), consisting of combinations of carbon atoms organized into hexagons and pentagons, named buckminsterfullerenes or fullerenes and possessing very promising mechanical and electrical properties. In 1991, Sumio Iijima, NEC Labs, Japan, and David S. Bethune, IBM Almaden Labs, observed the carbon atomic groups in the form of tubes capped by halves of the fullerene molecules and formed on the cathodes of carbon arc devices. The length of the tubes could be up to tens of micrometers and the diameter, naturally, is equal to that of the fullerene molecule. These tubes, called nanotubes, may be single wall (SWNT) or consist of several concentric tubes with a common axis (multi-walled nanotubes, MWNT). Two-dimensional graphene is another crystallographic modification of graphite (Saroj Nayak, Rensselaer U., 2004) that is a flat hexagonal network of carbon atoms with a thickness equal to the carbon atom size. The nanotube may be considered as formed by strips of graphene turned into a cylinder. The character of the electrical conductivity (metallic or semiconductive) of a SWNT depends on orientation of the carbon hexagons of the nanotube surface regarding its axis (the chiral angle [Ref. 1]). The following table contains some typical data on electrical and electronic properties of graphite materials.
Values in the table below refer to room-temperature measurements. Values of electrical resistivity in brackets [···] are in μΩ inch units.
Name | Electrical resistivity ρ/mΩ cm | Energy gap E/eV | Electron mobility μ/cm2 V-1 s-1 | (1/ρ)(dρ/dt)/ 10–4 °C–1 | Ref. |
Bulk graphite | |||||
Electromet graphite | 1.90 [750]e | -5 | 2 | ||
Electro graphite | 1.60 [630]e | -5 | 2 | ||
Aeromet graphite | 1.47 [580]e | -5 | 2 | ||
ESPI Superconductive | 1.75 [690]e | -5 | 2 | ||
Radioelectronics data | 30 [11,800]e | -5.6 | 3 | ||
Highly ordered pyrolytic graphite | Parallel 0.04 [15.7]e; across 150 [59000]e | 3 | |||
Single crystal graphite, normal to c-axis | 1·10-6 | 4 | |||
Graphenes | |||||
n-Graphene | ≈5 (М); ≈10 (Г)c | 106 | 5,6 | ||
p-Graphene | 104 | 7 | |||
Carbon nanotubes | |||||
Metallic SWNT | 12 kΩa | 1 | |||
Semiconducting SWNT | 0.7 – 0.9b | 128d | 1 | ||
MWNT | 102 | 9 | |||
Carbon fullerenes | |||||
Fullerene (C60) | 1012 | 1.95 | 10 |
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