STTR Phase I: Selective Carbon Nanotube Etching

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will demonstrate the feasibility of a gas precursor-assisted electron beam-based process for precise site-selective carbon nanotube (CNT) etching as a simple, effective, and damage-free way of controlling the fabrication and repair of carbon nanotube based nanodevices and for general materials manipulation on the nanosize level. The main innovation of the proposed etching process is (1) precise nanometer-scale linear etching operations, including nanotube cutting, shortening, cleaning, and other individual carbon nanotube operations, and (2) precise micron-scale area etching operations, including cleaning entire areas of unwanted nanotube growth. The central goal of this work is to investigate optimal chemistries and electron beam parameters that will result in the efficient and precise selective etching of carbon nanotubes.This STTR project will result in a simple, effective, and damage-free way of controlling the fabrication and repair of these CNT based nanodevices and for general materials manipulation on the nanosize level. The resulting process yield and product quality improvements will enable larger scale production of CNT AFM tips and CNT emitters as well as other new products we plan to develop for future markets. This research will also enable the development of other carbon nanotube based devices. These include CNT-based X-ray sources for semiconductor metrology, X-ray, microwave and Terahertz-ray sources. The work will support graduate students in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Tennessee, and in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Texas at Austin.