Single wall carbon nanotubes polymerization under compression: An atomistic molecular dynamics study

Recently, it was reported experimental observations of crosslinking between carbon nanotubes (CNTs) under pressure. Similarly to CNT growth formation the details of these polymerization processes are still unclear. In this work, we report a molecular dynamics simulation of the polymerization of a bundle of single-wall carbon nanotubes under compression using Brenner reactive potentials. Our results show that for small tube diameters extensive crosslinking formation can occur. For larger tube diameter, we obtained the first theoretical evidences that scroll-like structures (recently experimentally obtained) can be formed from SWCNTs.