CAPILLARITY AND WETTING OF CARBON NANOTUBES

The wetting and capillarity of carbon nanotubes were studied in detail here. Nanotubes are not ''super-straws,'' although they can be wet an d filled by substances having low surface tension, such as sulfur, sel enium, and cesium, with an upper limit to this tension less than 200 m illinewtons per meter. This limit implies that typical pure metals wil l not be drawn into the inner cavity of nanotubes through capillarity, whereas water and organic solvents will. These results have important implications for the further use of carbon nanotubes in experiments o n a nanometer scale.