Benjamin Barnes

Aligned and suspended carbon nanotubes can outperform randomly oriented networks in electronic biosensing and thin-film electronics. However, carbon nanotubes tend to bundle and form random networks. Here, we show that carbon nanotubes spontaneously align in an ammonium deoxycholate surfactant gel even under low shear forces, allowing direct writing and printing of nanotubes into electrically conducting wires and aligned thin layers across trenches.