Nanoscale Characterization of Individual Horizontally Aligned Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes.

One of the most challenging tasks in nanotube research is to identify the different electronic types of nanotubes for device fabrication. The implementation of standard spectroscopy techniques at the single-tube level has remained a great task due to small nanotube signal and low spatial resolution. Scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy (s-SNOM) yields information on the optical characteristics of the sample with high spatial resolution. We have already demonstrated that this method is able to distinguish between different electronic types of carbon nanotube bundles based on their optical properties in the infrared region. Now we applied the same method to characterize individual horizontally aligned single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]