Since their discovery, steady state arc discharge has been used for fullerenes and nanotubes production. Unfortunately this method intrinsically made it difficult to understand their growth mechanisms since the discharge included many complicated physical processes and the growth happened in the non-equilibrium arc plasma. Processes such as heating of the cathode by cation bombardment, emission of thermal electrons, and heating of the anode by electron bombardment are important in order to follow the mechanism, but it is difficult to study them separately. In the present work, however, it was shown that a pulse-arc discharge with a small current for a short time could simplify the discharge process and provide as-quenched arc products, which should be useful to understand the mechanisms.

Short discharges with a small current were performed on the pulse-arc system, which was developed by the authors.