Influence of the Catalyst Supporters upon the Catalyst Nano Particle for Synthesizing Single-walled Carbon Nanotubes

Controlling diameter and chirality of single-walled carbon nanotubes are most interesting aspects on synthesis, and these kinds of controls are desired to be done during the synthetic processes. In fact combination of catalysts, modifying their species, and adjusting the size of catalyst can roughly control the diameter distribution. However, since catalysts including cobalt atoms work much better for synthesizing SWNTs in alcohol catalytic chemical vapor deposition process, which is considered one of the best processes to synthesize, this fact restricts the flexibility of catalyst combination. Usually, supporters are used for avoiding the condensation of catalysts, but it turns out that sometimes these supporters give bad effects on catalysts of losing their catalytic activities. In this paper we synthesized SWNTs by using catalysts on different supporters and considered the influence of supporters by calculating their electronic structures