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Very high boron-doping on single-walled carbon nanotubes from a solid precursor

Abstract:

Despite the tremendous progress on the use of chemical vapor deposition as widespread method for the synthesis of pristine carbon nanotubes, introducing substitutional heteroatoms like boron on the carbon sites imposes several difficulties. The reported precursors used for boron-doped single-walled carbon nanotubes have exclusively been liquid based. Here we show that the use of solid sodium tetraphenylborate, which contains both carbon and boron in its stoichiometry, do not only effectively circumvent the experimental problems reported so far in the synthesis of these materials, but it enables the incorporation of up to 27.5 at.% of boron atoms in the samples as-grown. This percentage corresponds to a total B content, not to substitutional B configuration exclusively. Spectral deconvolution of the B1s signal suggests a 13 at.% of graphitic bonding environment of B within the samples. We propose an alternative method capable of producing B-doped singled-walled tubes with a small diameter distribution (∼0.89 nm to ∼1.9 nm) within a ∼60 °C temperature window.