Literature review with Dr Craigos

A late submission for our Research Paper Of The Weak comes from Chemical Communications, the journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK), via our esteemed correspondent from the materials sciences, Dr Craigos.

Electrochemical synthesis of metal and semimetal nanotube–nanowire heterojunctions and their electronic transport properties
Dachi Yang, Guowen Meng, Shuyuan Zhang, Yufeng Hao, Xiaohong An, Qing Wei, Min Ye and Lide Zhang
Chem. Commun. 2007, 1733-1735

Metal and semimetal nanotube–nanowire heterojunction arrays have been achieved by sequential electrochemical-deposition inside the nanochannels of anodic aluminium oxide template with a layer of Au thin enough to leave the pores open.

So far so dull.

Heterojunctions of one-dimensional nanostructures have received considerable attention due to their unique properties [1–3], and potential applications in nanodevices [4–8]. Previous studies on longitudinally segmented heteronanostructures have mainly focused on two segments of nanowires (NWs) [9–12], two segments of nanotubes (NTs) [13], and one segment of NTs and another segment of NWs [14–17]. For NT–NW heterostructures, the NT segments are usually carbon NTs, which have been prepared by catalytic growth [14], chemical vapor deposition [15], solid–solid reaction [16] and surface attaching methods [17]. However, little has been reported on nanoheterojunctions with one longitudinal segment consisting of metallic or semimetal NTs, which might have potential applications in future nanotechnology.

You getting all this?

Here, we demonstrate a facile approach for the building of metal and semimetal nanotube–nanowire (NT–NW) nanohetero-junction arrays by sequential electrochemical deposition of two materials inside the nanochannels of anodic aluminium oxide (AAO) template. Herein we take metal Cu and semimetal Bi as examples.
The heterojunction arrays of CuNTs...

Ah. And suddenly, the stunt goes horribly wrong.

From that point on in the text, there are no less than fifty occurrences of Derek and Clive's favourite noun, not to mention numerous carefully diagrams, complete with arrows helpfully pointing out CuNTs of interest. In describing one of the figures the authors indicate 'It can be seen that the CuNTs (marked by dashed circle III) are quite uniform with smooth surface', which suggests to me they've been airbrushed like in Playboy - Hef won't publish them any other way.

We should at this point concede that maybe English isn't the first language of this group, given they hail from the Institute of Solid State Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and that rationally there is no good a priori reason why an appropriate abbreviation for 'copper nanotube' would not be 'CuNT', aside from it being the foulest curse-word in the most broadly spoken language in the world. We'll give them a pass mark on this one; quite what the fuck the English editors of the journal were up to we can't say, but one thing seems certain - the Royal Society for Chemistry are a bunch of copper nanotubes.

The Doctor is OUT.