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Adsorption in Carbon Nanotubes

 
    Carbon nanotubes are long, thin, hollow cylinders formed by rolling up seamlessly a single layer of graphite. They can be either multiwall tubes, having several concentric shells, or single-wall tubes, having one single shell . After their discovery by Sumio Iijima (NEC Japan)  in 1991, much effort has been spent for producing high amounts of single-wall tubes with a uniform diameter distribution. This was achieved by two different methods in 1996 (Thess et al) and in 1997 (Journet et al), the resulting nanotubes forming a triangular lattice with a lattice constant of 17 A. The diameter of the tubes is narrowly distributed around 14 A, while their length is of the order of 1 micron.
    An important property of nanotubes is their capacity to draw inside materials which are then restricted to a quasi-1D motion. The very high amount adsorbed inside the nanotubes makes them potential fuel storage material (Dillon et al, 1997) while their radial size can be efficiently used to separate mixtures (Gaffney, 1996). Our work in this area is primarily concerned with physical adsorption in nanotubes. One of the most interesting issues in adsorption is the question of dimensionality of the system. A specified nanotube adsorption problem can exhibit behavior characteristic of one, two or three dimensions depending on thermodynamic (temperature and number of particles) or microscopic (atomic size relative to nanotube radius) parameters, and geometry (independent tubes or bundles).
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