Abstract Submitted to the NANOTUBE'05 Conference:

Carbon nanotubes are nanometer wide cylinders with extraordinary mechanical properties and unique electronic properties, and thus promising building blocks for nanosized electronic and electromechanical devices. For realization of these nanotube devices, a well-controlled process of plastic deformation of individual nanotubes is crucial. Substitution of hexagons by pentagons and heptagons is known to cause a permanent bend in the tube. We have explored a process for inducing the permanent bend in a straight nanotube by adopting a current flow as the energetic perturbation. Nanotubes examined were double-walled ones. An individual nanotube was manipulated using a nanomanipulator system installed in a transmission electron microscope. By introducing current to a nanotube elastically bent under mechanical duress we achieved to induce a permanent bend of plastic deformation in the originally straight nanotube. The most bending angles are between 20˚ and 30˚, which are formed by the insertion of pentagon-heptagon pairs in a nanotube. The onset of the plastic deformation, which is measured by the circumference-density of current, is more than twenty times smaller than that of the sublimation. The onset decreases with increasing the diameter of nanotubes and the energy of the electron beam used in the transmission electron microscope.

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