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"The single-walled carbon nanotube samples in this situation were just a jumble of tubes. They were not laid out in any pattern, and because of that, the heat generated from the flash could not dissipate, so the nanotubes just burned," explained Ajayan. The discovery was initially noted by Andres de la Guardia when he took flash photographs of the nanotubes. De la Guardia, currently a graduate student in operations research and statistics at Rensselaer, was a first-semester freshman at the time of the discovery. Since the discovery, the researchers have found that while the tubes burned only when oxygen is present, their atomic structure was altered even in inert gas environments. "From an applications perspective, our work opens up exciting possibilities of using low-power light sources to create new forms of nanomaterials, and will serve as a starting point for developing nanotube-based actuators and sensors that rely on remote activation and triggering," said Ramanath. The research is a collaborative effort between Rensselaer, a French group headed by T.W. Ebbesen, and researchers in Mexico and Germany. |
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