Morphological Similarities between Single-walled Nanotubes and Tubelike Structures of Polymers with Strong Adsorption Affinity to Nanowires

TL;DR

This paper investigates the structural similarities between polymer tubelike structures with strong nanowire adsorption and single-walled nanotubes, using computer simulations to compare their morphologies.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed simulation-based comparison of polymer and nanotube structures, highlighting their morphological similarities and differences.

Findings

Polymer tubelike structures resemble carbon nanotubes in morphology.

Triangular polymer tubes are closer analogs to carbon nanotubes than boron nitride tubes.

Simulations reveal detailed structural properties of polymer nanotube analogs.

Abstract

In their tubelike phase, nanowire-adsorbed polymers exhibit strong structural similarities to morphologies known from single-walled carbon (hexagonal) and boron (triangular) nanotubes. Since boron/boron nitride tubes require some disorder for stability the triangular polymer tubes provide a closer analog to the carbon tubes. By means of computer simulations of both two and three dimensional versions of a coarse-grained bead-spring model for the polymers, we investigate their structural properties and make a detailed comparison with structures of carbon nanotubes.