Mechanical relaxation and “intramolecular plasticity” in carbon nanotubes

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The question of how carbon nanotubes (CNT)—believed to be the strongest filaments—relax under tension has been addressed. A dislocation theory applied to a two-dimensional nanocrystal such as the CNT describes the main routes of mechanical relaxation in this molecular structure: a brittle cleavage or, at high temperatures, a plastic flow. Both start with diatomic rotation, which “unlocks” the pristine wall of CNT by creating a dislocation dipole with the pentagon–heptagon cores. Under high stress, the dislocations depart from each other along helical paths, leaving behind a nanotube of smaller diameter, well-defined new symmetry, and changed electrical properties.