Proceedings Article | 12 February 2007
KEYWORDS: Transmission electron microscopy, Silicon, Chemical vapor deposition, Single walled carbon nanotubes, Raman spectroscopy, Scanning electron microscopy, Atomic force microscopy, Carbon nanotubes, Oxides, Ions
Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and micro-Raman spectroscopy are key techniques in the structural
characterization of carbon nanotubes. For device applications, carbon nanotubes are typically grown by chemical vapor
deposition (CVD) on silicon substrates. However, TEM requires very thin samples, which are electron transparent.
Therefore, for TEM analysis, CVD grown nanotubes are typically deposited on commercial TEM grids by post-processing.
This procedure has two problems: It can damage the nanotubes, and it does not work reliably if the nanotube
density is too low. The ability to do TEM directly on as-grown nanotubes lying on the silicon substrate would solve these
two problems. In this talk, for this purpose, we fabricate micromachined TEM grids from silicon substrates.
Subsequently, we grow nanotubes on these micromachined TEM grids by CVD, and characterize the nanotubes by TEM,
micro-Raman spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and atomic force microscopy (AFM). We show that
these substrates provide a low cost, mass producible, efficient, and reliable platform for direct TEM, Raman, AFM, and
SEM analysis of as-grown nanotubes or other nanomaterials on the same substrate, eliminating the need for any post-processing
after CVD growth.
