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Updated: Aug 24, 2026
Precision Milling of Carbon Nanotube Forests Using Low Pressure Scanning Electron Microscopy
Published on: February 5, 2017
Geometric constant defining shape transitions of carbon nanotubes under pressure
Ji Zang1, Andrejs Treibergs, Y Han
1Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112, USA.
Abstract:
We demonstrate that when a single-walled carbon nanotube is under pressure it undergoes a series of shape transitions, first transforming from a circle to an oval and then from an oval to a peanut. Most remarkably, the ratio of the area of the tube cross sections at the second transition over that at the first transition appears as a constant, independent of the tube radius. Its accurate value is computed to be G=0.819 469, by formulating a variational geometry problem to represent single-walled carbon nanotubes with a family of closed plane curves of fixed length and minimum bending energy. The implications of such a geometric constant in designing nanotube electromechanical pressure sensors are discussed.
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