Elastomeric carbon nanotube circuits for local strain sensing

Abstract

The authors use elastomeric polydimethylsiloxane substrates to strain single-walled carbon nanotubes and modulate their electronic properties, with the aim of developing flexible materials that can sense their local strain. They demonstrate micron-scale nanotube devices that can be cycled repeatedly through strains as high as 20% while providing reproducible local strain transduction via the device resistance. They also compress individual nanotubes and find that they undergo an undulatory distortion with a characteristic spatial period of 100–200 nm, in agreement with continuum elasticity theory. These could potentially be used to create quantum-well superlattices within individual nanotubes, enabling novel devices and applications.