Assembly and integration of functional carbon nanotube structures

This dissertation reports the development of unique liquid phase assembly and integration methods of carbon nanotubes to fabricate functional structures. The effectiveness of these methods was also demonstrated by the excellent performance of the fabricated functional carbon nanotube field emission cathodes.; In the self assembly technique, homogeneous or patterned films of single wall nanotubes were fabricated by utilizing the surface functionality of the processed nanotubes. The single wall nanotube bundles were aligned uni-axially in the self assembled structures. Patterned single wall nanotube films with a minimum feature size 10mum were readily fabricated by this method. The field emission properties of the patterned single wall nanotube films by self assembly were comparable with those fabricated by existing assembly techniques.; The electrophoretic deposition (EPD) technique was successfully applied to fabricate patterned carbon nanotube films using lithographically defined substrates. The method demonstrated reliable and efficient patterning of large area substrates. The field emission properties of the patterned nanotube films proved the superiority of the developed method to other techniques in terms of threshold electric field and the emission uniformity. Gated carbon nanotube field emission cathodes were also fabricated using the EPD method and they showed promising triode field emission properties.