Polarized Raman Study of Aligned Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes Arrays under High Pressure

Tuning the intertube interaction and the topological structure of carbon nanotubes by the application of pressure may obviously affect their properties such as optical and electronic properties. However, characterizing such changes is still challenging. Here, we performed polarized Raman scattering studies on aligned multiwalled carbon nanotube arrays (MWNTAs). Unlike researchers from the previous literature, we found that the MWNTAs exhibit a polarization dependence similar to that of isolated single-walled carbon nanotubes at ambient conditions. Upon compression, the polarization dependence weakens gradually with increasing pressure up to similar to 20 GPa, which has been discussed in terms of pressure-induced enhancement of intertube interactions. At around 20 GPa, the depolarization effect vanishes, which can be explained by the formation of interlinked sp(3) bonding in the MWNTAs. Our results show that polarized Raman spectroscopy is an efficient method to explore not only intertube interaction but also structural transition changes in MWNTs, which overcome the difficulty that MWNTs have no obvious fingerprints like those of single-walled carbon nanotubes in the study of structural transformations.