Substrate-site selective growth of aligned carbon nanotubes

We report highly substrate-site selective growth of carbon nanotubes by che mical vapor deposition from precursors of ferrocene and xylene mixtures. Th e technique allows us to grow well-aligned multiwalled carbon nanotubes pre ferentially on the SiO2 regions of patterned SiO2/Si substrates prepared by conventional lithography. This eliminates the catalyst predeposition step in the fabrication process. This simple approach may also be applied to bui ld large-scale networks of organized nanotubes on planar substrates. (C) 20 00 American Institute of Physics. [S0003-6951(00)00350-8].