Engineering radial deformations in single-walled carbon and boron nitride nanotubes using ultrathin nanomembranes

Radial deformations of carbon and boron-nitride nanotubes are of great importance to their respective electronic properties and applications. In this paper, we present a simple and practical approach of engineering radial deformations in single-walled carbon and boron-nitride nanotubes (SWCNTs and SW-BNNTs) through covering individual nanotubes lying on flat substrates with subnanometer-thick monolayer graphene oxide (GO) nanomembranes. The GO membrane conforms to and transversely compresses the underlying nanotube as a result of its adhesion binding interaction with the substrate. Our atomic force microscopy (AFM) imaging measurements reveal that the engineered net radial deformations of both types of tubes increase with the tube diameter and are more for SW-BNNTs compared with SWCNTs of the same tube diameter. Our results capture the net cross-section height reductions of up to 44.1% for SW-BNNTs and up to 29.7% for SWCNTs. Our work clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed approach for engineering and controlling the radial deformation in one-dimensional tubular nanostructures and opens a promising route for mechanical tuning of their electronic properties for novel nanoelectronics applications.