The engineering of hot carbon nanotubes with a focused electron beam

Single-wall and multiwall carbon nanotubes at high temperature are irradiated with the focused electron beam in an electron microscope. Nanotubes can be tailored with monolayer precision, and new morphologies of nanotubes are created. Atoms from layers of multiwall tubes can be removed and the tubes can be bent by a predefined angle. Bundles of single-wall tubes are transformed locally to multiwall tubes with coherent transition between the two modifications.