Abstract Submitted to the    NANOTUBE'04 Conference:

MWNTs can be synthesized by reacting aerosols of metal catalysts such as ferrocene with a carbon source at moderate temperatures, with speculation that there is potential to control the diameter of the resultant nanotube by controlling the size of the aerosol droplet [1]. We report here an alternate approach to the aerosol based method in which differently sized molecular cluster materials are used as the catalysts and entrained in an aerosol in which each droplet is intended to contain only one preformed cluster. This aerosol is introduced into a furnace at 900-1000 ^oC in the presence of a carbon source such as methane and the resulting material characterized using techniques such as TEM and Raman spectroscopy. Correlations between the size of the catalytic particle and the nanotube diameter will be discussed.

[1] M. Mayne et al, Chem. Phys. Lett., 338, 101 (2001).