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It is well-known that electric and magnetic fields can control the growth direction, morphology and microstructure of one-dimensional carbon nanomaterials (1-DCNMs), which plays a key role for its potential applications in micro-nano-electrics and devices. In this paper, we introduce a novel process for controlling growth of carbon nanofibers (CNFs) with assistance of a strong magnetic field (up to 0.5 T in the center) in a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) system. The results reveal that: 1) The CNFs get bundled when grown in the presence of a strong magnetic field and slightly get aligned parallel to the direction of the magnetic field; 2) The CNFs diameter become narrowed and homogenized with increase of the magnetic field; 3) With the increase of the magnetic field, the microstructure of CNFs is gradually changed, i.e., the strong magnetic field makes the disordered "solid-cored" CNFs transform into a kind of bamboo-liked carbon nanotubes; 4) We propose a mechanism that the reason for these variations and transformation is due to diamagnetic property of carbon atoms, so that it has direction selectivity in the precipitation process.
Luo et al. (Thu,) studied this question.