Materials Science & Processing Springer-Verlag 1999

Abstract. A variety of outstanding experimental results on the elucidation of the elastic properties of carbon nanotubes are fast appearing. These are based mainly on the tech-niques of high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) to deter-mine the Young’s moduli of single-wall nanotube bundles and multi-walled nanotubes, prepared by a number of methods. These results are confirming the theoretical predictions that carbon nanotubes have high strength plus extraordinary flexi-bility and resilience. As well as summarising the most notable achievements of theory and experiment in the last few years, this paper explains the properties of nanotubes in the wider context of materials science and highlights the contribution of our research group in this rapidly expanding field. A deeper understanding of the relationship between the structural orde