Multiwalled nanotube faceting unravelled

Abstract

Nanotubes show great promise for miniaturizing advanced technologies. Their exceptional physical properties are intimately related to their morphological and crystal structure. Circumferential faceting of multiwalled nanotubes reinforces their mechanical strength and alters their tribological and electronic properties. Here, the nature of this important phenomenon is fully rationalized in terms of interlayer registry patterns. Regardless of the nanotube identity (that is, diameter, chirality, chemical composition), faceting requires the matching of the chiral angles of adjacent layers. Above a critical diameter that corresponds well with experimental results, achiral multiwalled nanotubes display evenly spaced extended axial facets whose number equals the interlayer difference in circumferential unit cells. Elongated helical facets, commonly observed in experiment, appear in nanotubes that exhibit small interlayer chiral angle mismatch. When the wall chiralities are uncorrelated, faceting is suppressed and outer layer corrugation, which is induced by the moiré superlattice, is obtained in agreement with experiments. Finally, we offer an explanation for the higher incidence of faceting in multiwalled boron nitride nanotubes with respect to their carbon-based counterparts.

References in corpus (4)

• Superlubricity - a new perspective on an established paradigm
• Incommensurate double-walled carbon nanotubes as one-dimensional moiré crystals
• Quantifying the Stacking Registry Matching in Layered Materials
• Polygonization of carbon nanotubes

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Negative Friction Coefficients in Superlubric Graphite-Hexagonal Boron Nitride Heterojunctions
• Anisotropic Interlayer Force Field for Group-VI Transition Metal Dichalcogenides
• The Smallest Archimedean Screw: Facet Dynamics and Friction in Multi-Walled Nanotubes
• Universal Moiré Buckling of Freestanding 2D Bilayers
• Modular hybrid machine learning and physics-based potentials for scalable modeling of van der Waals heterostructures
• Electronic structure of folded hexagonal boron nitride