Damaged carbon nanotubes get healed by ion irradiation

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are being used for varied applications. It is therefore important to study their stability under extreme conditions of temperature and irradiation. In this work, we report the stability of CNTs [both single-wall CNTs (SWCNTs) and multiwalled CNTs (MWCNTs)] under irradiation of a carbon ion beam of energy 55 MeV. The irradiated samples were analyzed using Raman spectroscopy. The Raman results indicate the interesting phenomenon of healing or annealing of CNTs under ion beam irradiation. The annealing process appears to begin at the lowest value of fluences and persists for quite a good range of fluence values. As the irradiation dose increases (≅1x1014 ions/cm2) the MWCNTs begin to amorphize whereas the SWCNTs system continues to heal.