Duke University chemists have found a way to grow swarms of long, straight cylinders only a few atoms thick in very large numbers by using the crystal structure of a quartz surface as a template.

These single-walled carbon nanotubes also follow parallel paths as they grow, so they don’t cross each other to potentially impede electronic performance. Carbon nanotubes can act as semiconductors and could thus further scale-down circuitry to nanometer features.

The availability of forests of identical nanotubes would allow future nanoengineers to bundle them onto multiple ultra-tiny chips that could operate with enough power and speed for nanoprocessing, using less-expensive semiconductor wafers normally used in computer chips.

Source: Nanotubes grown straight in large numbers, Duke University