Effects of catalyst film thickness on plasma-enhanced carbon nanotube growth

A systematic study is presented of the influence of catalyst film thickness on carbon nanostructures grown by plasma-enhanced chemical-vapor deposition from acetylene and ammonia mixtures. We show that reducing the Fe/Co catalyst film thickness below 3 nm causes a transition from larger diameter (>40 nm), bamboolike carbon nanofibers to small diameter (similar to 5 nm) multiwalled nanotubes with two to five walls. This is accompanied by a more than 50 times faster growth rate and a faster catalyst poisoning. Thin Ni catalyst films only trigger such a growth transition when pretreated with an ammonia plasma. We observe a limited correlation between this growth transition and the coarsening of the catalyst film before deposition. For a growth temperature of <= 550 degrees C, all catalysts showed mainly a tip growth regime and a similar activity on untreated silicon, oxidized silicon, and silicon nitride support. (c) 2005 American Institute of Physics.