Nanotube nanotweezers

Science

Volumn 286, Issue 5447, 1999, Pages 2148-2150

  Kim, Philip ^a,b   Lieber, Charles M ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GALLIUM ARSENIDE; NANOPARTICLE; SILICONE;

ARTICLE; ELECTRIC CONDUCTIVITY; ELECTRODE; MICROPIPETTE; PRIORITY JOURNAL; SCANNING ELECTRON MICROSCOPY; TECHNOLOGY;

EID: 0032787499     PISSN: 00368075     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1126/science.286.5447.2148     Document Type: Article

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20. The time required to attach nanotubes to the electrodes and make a working device is typically less than 2 hours. The overall yield of this process, determined from all of our experiments, is >50%.
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22. Calculations show that the potential energy versus separation typically has two minima corresponding to the open/relaxed and contact structures; that is, the system is bistable (P. Kim, K. Kim, T. Rueckes, E. Joselevich, C. M. Lieber, unpublished results).
23. The spheres used were uniformly dyed polystyrene microspheres 0.31 μm in diameter (XC Estapor, Bangs Laboratories, Fishers, IN).
24. The grabbing force exerted on the spheres by the nanotweezers is ≥10 nN. Without the applied voltage to close the nanotweezers' arms, <10% (20 trials) of the experiments resulted in the removal of a polystyrene sphere. This shows that the adhesion force is generally not sufficient to enable sphere manipulation. However, when the applied voltage was used to close the nanotweezers on a polystyrene sphere, >80% of the experiments resulted in the removal of the spheres.
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34. Electromechanical actuation of the nanotweezers is not ideal for aqueous solution work. Several approaches can be used to overcome potential problems. First, the actuating portion of the tweezers could be removed from solution because of the very high aspect ratio of carbon nanotubes. Second, it is possible to reduce the operating voltage to very low levels (0.1 V) at which electrochemical processes should not be a problem. Using Eq. 1, we find that nanotweezers with nanotubes 5 μm long and 10 nm in diameter will close at 0.1 V. Third, it may be possible to exploit other mechanisms for closing the nanotweezers [R. H. Baughman et al., Science 284, 1340 (1999)].
35. We thank S. S. Wong and L. Venkataraman for helpful discussion and J. H. Hafner for providing MWNT samples. This work was supported by NSF.