Skip to content

Helical microtubules of graphitic carbon

Why this mattered

Iijima’s 1991 Nature paper mattered because it gave compelling electron-microscopy evidence that carbon could form stable, hollow, nanoscale cylinders made of concentric graphitic sheets: what became known as multi-walled carbon nanotubes. Before this, carbon’s canonical extended forms were graphite, diamond, and, after 1985, fullerenes. The paper showed that the fullerene discovery was not an isolated molecular curiosity but part of a broader structural chemistry of curved sp²-bonded carbon, where graphene-like sheets could close into tubes with nanometer diameters and high aspect ratios.

The paradigm shift was that carbon nanostructures became objects that could be directly imagined, synthesized, imaged, and eventually engineered as quasi-one-dimensional materials. A graphitic cylinder implied unusual mechanical strength, chemical stability, and electronic behavior governed by tube geometry, even though the 1991 paper itself was primarily structural rather than a full theory of nanotube properties. It made plausible a new materials platform: wires, fibers, field emitters, probes, composites, and nanoscale devices built from atomically ordered carbon tubes.

Subsequent breakthroughs followed quickly from the conceptual opening this paper created: theoretical work connected nanotube chirality to metallic or semiconducting behavior; single-walled nanotubes were reported in 1993; improved synthesis methods made bulk and aligned samples possible; and nanotubes became central to nanotechnology research in electronics, mechanics, energy storage, microscopy, and composite materials. Many later applications proved difficult to commercialize at the scales first imagined, but the paper’s durable importance is that it turned carbon nanotubes from an unseen possibility into a concrete experimental system, helping define the modern era of carbon nanoscience.

Abstract

(no abstract available)

  • cite → C60: Buckminsterfullerene — Carbon nanotube helicity is linked to C60 by the shared concept that graphitic carbon can form stable curved sp2-bonded fullerene structures.
  • enables → Two-dimensional atomic crystals — Carbon nanotube work established stable graphitic carbon nanostructures, helping motivate the isolation and study of atomically thin graphene crystals.
  • cite ← Two-dimensional atomic crystals — Geim and Novoselov cite Iijima's carbon nanotubes as a graphitic carbon analogue showing that carbon can form stable low-dimensional crystalline structures.
  • enables ← C60: Buckminsterfullerene — The discovery of stable curved sp2 carbon cages in C60 motivated Iijima's interpretation of graphitic carbon microtubules as related closed carbon nanostructures.

Sources