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Neat, densely packed, and highly aligned carbon nanotube fibers (CNTFs) have appealing room-temperature axial thermal conductivity (k) and thermal diffusivity (α) for applications in lightweight heat spreading, flexible thermal connections, and thermoelectric active cooling. Although CNTFs are regularly produced from different input carbon nanotubes (CNTs), prior work has not quantified how the CNT molecular aspect ratio r (i.e., molecular length-to-diameter ratio) influences k and α in well-aligned, packed CNTFs. Here, we perform self-heated steady-state and three-omega thermal measurements at room temperature on CNTF suspended in vacuum. Our results show that k increases from 150 to 380W/mK for viscosity-averaged molecular aspect ratios increasing from r=960 to 5600 and nanotube diameters of ∼2 nm, which we attribute to the effects of thermal resistances between CNT bundles. CNTFs made with varying volume fraction ϕ of constituent high-r and low-r CNT have properties that fall within or below the typical macroscopic rule-of-mixtures bounds. The thermal diffusivity α scales with k, leading to a sample-averaged volumetric heat capacity of 1.5±0.3MJ/m3K. This work's findings that fibers made from longer CNT have larger k and α at room temperature motivate further investigation into thermal transport in solution-spun CNTF. 

Abstract Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) possess extremely anisotropic electronic, thermal, and optical properties owing to their 1D character. While their linear optical properties have been extensively studied, nonlinear optical processes, such as harmonic generation for frequency conversion, remain largely unexplored in CNTs, particularly in macroscopic CNT assemblies. In this work, macroscopic films of aligned and type‐separated (semiconducting and metallic) CNTs are synthesized and polarization‐dependent third‐harmonic generation (THG) from the films with fundamental wavelengths ranging from 1.5 to 2.5 µm is studied. Both films exhibited strongly wavelength‐dependent, intense THG signals, enhanced through exciton resonances, and third‐order nonlinear optical susceptibilities of 2.50 × 10⁻¹⁹ m² V⁻²(semiconducting CNTs) and 1.23 × 10⁻¹⁹ m² V⁻²(metallic CNTs), respectively are found, for 1.8 µm excitation. Further, through systematic polarization‐dependent THG measurements, the values of all elements of the susceptibility tensor are determined, verifying the macroscopically 1D nature of the films. Finally, polarized THG imaging is performed to demonstrate the nonlinear anisotropy in the large‐size CNT film with good alignment. These findings promise applications of aligned CNT films in mid‐infrared frequency conversion, nonlinear optical switching, polarized pulsed lasers, polarized long‐wave detection, and high‐performance anisotropic nonlinear photonic devices.