Epitaxial growth of single-wall carbon nanotubes

Single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) have been a focus of nanomaterial research over the past two decades, due to their wide range of potential applications in micro- and nano-electronics, energy storage, solar cells, sensors, drug delivery, and neuronal interfaces. Structurally-uniform and chirality-pure SWCNTs are highly desired and essential for both fundamental studies and many applications such as electronics, optoelectronics, and biomedical imaging. Great efforts have been devoted to the controllable synthesis of SWCNTs with defined helicities by investigating and understanding the parameters involved in their growth. In recent years, epitaxial growth has been found to be a powerful strategy in growing uniform SWCNTs using low-dimensional nanocarbons, organic macromolecules and metal nanoparticles as growth seeds or templates to control their nucleation. This article summarizes recent progress on the epitaxial growth of SWCNTs, and then outlines the challenges remaining in this field.