Plumbing carbon nanotubes

Since their discovery, the possibility of connecting carbon nanotubes together like water pipes has been an intriguing prospect for these hollow nanostructures. The serial joining of carbon nanotubes in a controlled manner offers a promising approach for the bottom-up engineering of nanotube structures--from simply increasing their aspect ratio to making integrated carbon nanotube devices. To date, however, there have been few reports of the joining of two different carbon nanotubes. Here we demonstrate that a Joule heating process, and associated electro-migration effects, can be used to connect two carbon nanotubes that have the same (or similar) diameters. More generally, with the assistance of a tungsten metal particle, this technique can be used to seamlessly join any two carbon nanotubes--regardless of their diameters--to form new nanotube structures.