Adsorption-induced scission of titanate nanotubes

Short titanate nanotubes are promising materials showing high capacity for applications in medicine, electronic device and composite materials, etc. In this paper, nearly endless and disorderly tangled titanate nanotubes were cut into short segments roughly ranging from 40 to 100 nm via a soft cutting method i.e. adsorption-induced scission. The titanate nanotubes before and after scission were characterized by transmission electron microscope (TEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) and ultra-visible spectrometry technique. The crystal structure and spectral characteristics of the initial titanate nanotubes are found to be retained after scission.