ABSTRACT

Characterization tools are crucial in the study of emerging materials to evaluate their full potential in applications and to comprehend their basic physical and chemical properties. Typically, a wide range of tools are brought to bear in order to elicit these properties. This chapter presents a variety of techniques that have helped reveal some of the intrinsic properties of carbon nanotubes. The list of techniques that probe these properties is long, and more often these techniques reveal only a portion of the full spectrum of the exciting properties of carbon nanotubes. The following sections describe these techniques; for detailed information on a specific technique, the reader should refer to the original publications in the referenced literature.